Dogmatism Quotes

But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics. ~ Jonah Goldberg

If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism. ~ Mark A. Noll

The idea of freedom can never be disassociated from real Prussia. The real Prussian spirit means a synthesis between restraint and freedom, between voluntary subordination and conscientious leadership, between pride in oneself and consideration for others, between rigor and compassion. Unless a balance is kept between these qualities, the Prussian spirit is in danger of degenerating into soulless routine and narrow-minded dogmatism. ~ Henning Von Tresckow

There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes - such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power - and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed. ~ Orlando Figes

The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher ~ Gregory B. Sadler

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine.

Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this "life begins at the moment of conception" business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of "religious faith." In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature. ~ Sam Harris

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues. ~ Leo Strauss

Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed. ~ Immanuel Kant

Fanatics are like debris following the course of the wind, they are swept around like sand, and convinced to believe in what they do not understand. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin. ~ William O. Douglas

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols ~ Aldous Huxley

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision. ~ Thomas Sowell

All the systems which explain so precisely why the world is as it is and why it can never be otherwise, have always called forth in me the same kind of uneasiness one has when face to face with the regulations displayed under the glaring lights of a prison cell. Even if one had been born in prison and had never seen the stars or seas or woods, one would instinctively know of timeless freedom in unlimited space.

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable where in fashion.... "Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Centre; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed" - we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again in five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end. ~ Ernst Junger

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything - it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention. ~ Christopher Hitchens

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. ~ Alister E. McGrath

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity... and the West... and white skin... ~ Jean Raspail

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. ~ Graham Greene

Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse. ~ Neil Postman

Despite my admiration for scientific knowledge, I am not an adherent of scientism. For scientism dogmatically asserts the authority of scientific knowledge; whereas I do not believe in any authority and have always resisted dogmatism; and I continue to resist it, especially in science. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must believe in his theory. As far as I am concerned "I do not believe in belief," as E. M. Forster says; and I especially do not believe in belief in science. I believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few instances. I believe, for example, that objective truth is a value - that is, an ethical value, perhaps the greatest value there is - and that cruelty is the greatest evil. ~ Karl R. Popper

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the world everyone knows enough to pursue what he does not know, but no one knows enough to pursue what he already knows. Everyone knows enough to condemn what he takes to be no good, but no one knows enough to condemn what he has already taken to be good. ~ Zhuangzi

Certainty closes many doors," he replied. "It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards. ~ Jo Walton

It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism. ~ Nanamoli Thera

Hypatia's case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure - the Museum and the libraries - had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life. ~ Michael A.B. Deakin

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research. ~ Ronald Fisher

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism. ~ Rodney Stark

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism. ~ William Osler

Truth is independent of all dogmas, ancient or modern. ~ Abhijit Naskar

There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side. ~ Oscar Levant

Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism. ~ Sextus Empiricus

To the intellect all else, in comparison with what is correct, counts only as feeling, subjectivity, instinct. In this division, apart from the bright world of the intellect, there is only the irrational, in which is lumped together, according to the point of view, what is despised or desired. The impulse which pursues real truth by thought springs from the dissatisfaction with what is merely correct. The division, spoken of previously, paralyses this impulse; it causes man to oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellect that transcends its limits and, as it were, the rapture of the vital, the chance of the moment, life. The soul becomes impoverished in all the multiplicity of disparate experience. Then truth disappears from the field of vision and is replaced by a variety of opinions which are hung on the skeleton of a supposedly rational pattern. Truth is infinitely more than scientific correctness. ~ Karl Jaspers

I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill. ~ Matt Walsh

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth ~ Blaise Pascal

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can. ~ Arthur Koestler

Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance. ~ Roberto Bolano

The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile ... ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

... everything based on arguments involving the 'is' of identidy and the older el (elementalistic) 'logic' and 'psychology', such as the prevailing doctrines, laws, institutions, systems. , cannot possibly be in full accordance with the structure of our nervous system. This, in turn, affects the latter and results in the prevailing private and public un-sanity. Hence, the unrest, unhappines, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our instituitions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of 'mental ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists - which in the last-named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness. ~ Alfred Korzybski

I don't like dogmas; i don't want to be kept in a box ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

A dogmatical spirit inclines a man to be censorious of his neighbors. Every one of his opinions appears to him written, as it were, with sunbeams, and he grows angry that his neighbors do not see it in the same light. He is tempted to disdain his correspondents as men of low and dark understandings because they do not believe what he does. ~ Isaac Watts

I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. ~ Frans De Waal

True politeness is consideration for the opinions of others. It has been said of dogmatism that it is only puppyism come to its full growth; and certainly the worst form this quality can assume is that of opinionativeness and arrogance. ~ Samuel Smiles

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

{Letter to his son and 6th US president, John Quincy Adams, November 13 1816} ~ John Adams

The leading principle of the goal is distinguished by first-hand experience, beyond speech, imagination, and words, reaching the realm where there is no impulse, the inherent characteristic of arrival at the stage of first-hand realization, excluding all the destructive forces of speculation and dogmatism." "The ~ Thomas Cleary

Radionics was conceived as a diagnostic and treatment technology at a time when modern electronic theory and biomedicine had not become the dominant sciences they are today. Early radionic devices incorporated the new discoveries of radio and electronics into their design. During that period, the functional assumptions of radionic technology did not seem as implausible as it does today. However, it wasn't long before radionics became outmoded and completely non-scientific. As Mizrach has noted, radionics continued to appropriate the methods of orthodox science into its design and terminology, making the probability of understanding what it could accomplish even more difficult to assess. I will examine this appropriation in a spirit of tolerance, given the state of electronics and medicine circa 1910, when radionics was first discovered. I will do so in order to shift the focus of this interesting technology from the scientific to the metaphysical, where the reader not limited by a need for scientific approval can evaluate it. My aim is to provide a reasonable means of evaluating radionic technology as an artistic methodology. ~ Duncan Laurie

There is a certain tyranny about perfection, a certain exhaustion about it even, something that denies the viewer a role in its creation and that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of an unambiguous statement. True beauty cannot be measured because it is fluctuating, it has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those areas that will also lend themselves to ugliness. Nothing can be beautiful that does not take a calculated risk with ugliness. ~ Alain De Botton

For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims ... this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Is it true that dogmatism "means assertiveness without knowledge?" How do you know that the assertiveness is without knowledge? When the eleven disciples asserted that Christ appeared to them in the upper room after his resurrection, and they thrust their hands in the wounds in his side and his hands, was it assertion without knowledge? Their statement is dogmatic, and justly so. True religion is dogmatic. All truth is dogmatic. . . . The prophets were dogmatic, and when they received revelation, had visions and visitations from heavenly personages, they knew it, they were not deceived, and their assertions were dogmatic, righteously so. ~ Joseph Fielding Smith

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. ~ William James

Scientists are dedicated to asking questions in the search for truth. But they too are human, and like all humans, they would like their answers to be clean and clear and easy. In their desire for simple solutions, scientists are prone to fall into two traps as they question the reality of God. The first is to throw the baby out with the bath water. And the second is tunnel vision. There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic? ~ M. Scott Peck

[S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically. ~ Nel Noddings

When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities. ~ David Hume

Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism ... the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young. ~ Henry Seidel Canby

Dogmatism makes for scientific anemia. ~ Gordon W. Allport

If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise. ~ Peter Kreeft

Faith: The opposite of dogmatism. ~ John Ralston Saul

If you've got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you've got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment. ~ Cornel West

A man could be dogmatic, and that was all right, or he could be stupid, and no harm done, but stupid and dogmatic at the same time was too much, especially fluxed with body odor. ~ Terry Pratchett

The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time. ~ Sam Harris

We need some heterodoxy in social science in order for them to avoid death by suffocation under dogmatism. ~ Bourdieu, Pierre

Bigotry is chronic dogmatism. ~ Horace Greeley

Any mode of thought that lays out complete and final answers to great existential questions is liable to dogmatism. A great attraction of care ethics, I think, is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. [...] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible. [...] it recognizes that virtually all human beings desire not to be hurt, and this gives us something close to an absolute: We should not inflict deliberate hurt or pain. Even when we must fight to save our children, we must not inflict unnecessary or deliberate pain. ~ Nel Noddings

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. ~ Earl Weaver

That is why the second coming of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment. Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom. This must be regarded as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and that no one can escape giving an account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is in any case also necessary in order to draw the line between faith and false dogmatism or a false Christian self-confidence. This line alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. ...

Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to a life of faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of grace that frees helpless man and,no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the ~ Benedict XVI

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Dogmatism of all kinds
scientific, economic, moral, as well as political
are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76) ~ Rollo May

It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world. ~ Maxwell Perkins

A candid spirit is mightier than the most persistent dogmatism. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments. ~ Richard Rorty

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. ~ C.S. Lewis

While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. ~ Sam Harris

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness. ~ Bertrand Russell

If God might be comprehended, he would not be God. An over-confident dogmatism is as fatal to theistic belief as scepticism itself; it pretends to prove and to define, only to discover that what it has defined and proved is not its Lord and God. You can no more catch God's infinity in a net of words than...you can fish out the sea the glories of the dying day. ~ Austin Farrer

The 'either-or' dogmatism, the stubbornly principled refusal to entertain compromise or concession, had served him well and had invariably proved successful in his political 'career' as long as he was combating weak, divided, and irresolute opponents. But it was a massive and insuperable obstacle when enemy positions were strong and united, when initiative had been irretrievably lost, bargaining power was weakening by the day, and more flexible military tactics and more subtle political skills were desperately needed. Not ~ Ian Kershaw

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

What am I to choose? "Choose what you please, as long as you choose." There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The first mindfulness training: reverence for life Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing, compassion, and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger, fear, greed, and intolerance, which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking, I will cultivate openness, nondiscrimination, and nonattachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty. ~ Robert Kennedy

Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass? ~ Michel De Montaigne

All forms of dogmatic thought create certain problems to the intellect, confining it to very narrow limits. The thought that is impossible to be criticized is going sooner or later to manipulate your own thought. The critical thinking area of the brain would immediately be blocked, if a person is convinced to blindly believe in the existence of some sacred texts or fundamental canons, which are allegedly representation of God's will or some 'perfect' human mind. As soon as emerges such an inevitable belief, the brain automatically begins to set some limits to its function, trying to give the dogmatic thought some rational sense with the help of science and logic, if it is possible, or merely to adjust blind imitation of them without any rational explanation and understanding, if it is impossible. It is very obvious fact that no intelligence can develop in that condition. Whatever rational and logical meaning you can find there, it is because of the brain activity, which gives dogmatism some reasonable sense. Without the brain activity, it is just a symbolism or merely absurdism. If this is so, why should any intelligence need the existence of any dogmatism, regardless of whether it is a religion or some kind of ideological doctrine? ~ Elmar Hussein

The end result is spirituality without dogma, religion without God, argument without substance, rationalization without rationality, and tranquillity by transfer of funds from the seeker's bank account to the company that makes the best offer of nirvana, at the same time producing dogmatism about relativism in matters of ultimate meaning. ~ Ravi Zacharias

We have seen, therefore, that I am not allowed even to *assume*, for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason *God, freedom, immortality*, unless at the same time *I deprive* speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insights. Reason, namely, in order to arrive at these, must employ principles which extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if in spite of this they are applied also to what cannot be an object of experience, actually always change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical *expansion* of pure reason impossible. Hence I had to suspend *knowledge* in order to make room for *belief*. For the dogmatism of metaphysics without a preceding critique of pure reason, is the source of all that disbelief which opposes morality and which is always very dogmatic. ~ Immanuel Kant

It is not that religion is merely useless, it is mischievous. It is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises. ~ Frances Wright

Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It's also a dead give-away that the person doesn't know why he believes what he believes. ~ Bob Altemeyer

Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition ... [and therefore] 'On to God! ~ Max Planck

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it give you a choice: 'Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.' When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: 'Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.' And just as we don't want to admit we are fools, we also don't want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains. ~ Beatrice Webb

Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Suggestion is generally better than Definition. There is a seeming dogmatism about Definition that is often repellent, while Suggestion, on the contrary, disarms suspicion and summons to co-operation and experiment. Definition provokes discussion. Suggestion provokes to love and good works. Defining is limiting. Suggestion is enlarging. Defining calls a halt; Suggestion calls for an advance. Defining involves the peril of contentment: "I am here, I rest." "Thus far," says Definition, and draws a map. "Westward," cries Suggestion, and builds a boat. ~ Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialisation. Yet it cannot shirk all responsibility for them, either. Secular movements and scientific institutions have mesmerised billions with promises to perfect humanity and to utilise the bounty of planet Earth for the benefit of our species. Such promises resulted not just in overcoming plagues and famines, but also in gulags and melting ice caps. You might well argue that this is all the fault of people misunderstanding and distorting the core secular ideals and the true facts of science. And you are absolutely right. But that is a common problem for all influential movements.
For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort that all these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathise with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities – they should rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their 'religion of love' allow itself to be distorted in such a way, ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason ; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us? I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, I mean a necessary dialectical tool. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Dogmation is puppyism come to its full growth. ~ Douglas William Jerrold

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists ... who often confuse their religion with their science. ~ John C. Eccles

We have to get over the idea that there's some right way to live. ~ Marty Rubin