Thinking about thinking

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” 

 Christopher Hitchens

“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind” 

― Jim Morrison

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” 

Henry Ford

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” 

Albert Einstein

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” 

Plutarch

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” 

― Voltaire

“Five percent of the people think; 

ten percent of the people think they think; 

and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” 

― Thomas A Edison

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” 

― Jean Racine

“Stop thinking, and end your problems.” 

Lao Tzu 

“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."

― A.A.Milne

                                           

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.” 

― Ray Bradbury

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.” 

― Albert Einstein

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche