Openness

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder.

The fundamental difference between the liberal and the illiberal outlook is that the former regards all questions as open to discussion and all opinions as open to a greater or lesser measure of doubt, while the latter holds in advance that certain opinions are absolutely unquestionable, and that no argument against them must be allowed be heard. What is curious about this position is the belief that if impartial investigation were permitted it would lead men to the wrong conclusion, and that ignorance is, therfore, the only safeguard against terror. This point of view cannot be accepted by any man who wishes reason rather than prejudice to govern human action.

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! - of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand.  Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.  You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder.  If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth.

If you stop and confine yourself to one place, you will develop prejudices.

Shade and light are different in every valley.

Hear all sides and you will be enlightened. Hear one side and you will be in the dark.

Do not worry if others do not understand you.  Worry if you do not understand them.

Find enlightenment through heeding many points of view.  Find ignorance through heeding few.

Cultural differences should not separate us from each other, but rather cultural diversity brings a collective strength that can benefit all of humanity.

If the future is to remain open and free,
we need people who can tolerate the unknown,
who will not need the support of completeley
worked-out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

It's a mistake to surround yourself
only with people just like you.
Throw off that worn comforter --
and replace it with a crazy quilt of
different and imaginative people.
Then watch the ideas erupt!

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Your mind has enormous hidden dimensions. Open yourselves completely to whatever reactions and emotions the world evokes from time to time. Accept them all without any reservation or resentment. By assimilating everything and all, your mind grows deeper, stabler and more enriched.

We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion.

Creativity can never be explained by appeal to reason alone.  Like the birth of a child, creativity compels us not to explanation but to wonder and awe.