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Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group.

Given the force of the group’s normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value.

The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the decisions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent.

Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.

Noam Chomsky

Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.

Bell Hooks

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a terrible mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

Epictetus

An environment that is not safe to disagree in is not an environment focused on growth - it’s an environment focused on control.

Wendi Jade

When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them - and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it.

Thomas Merton, Follow the Ecstasy

The more we retreat from the culture at large, the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture, and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.

Chris Hedges

We’ve created a culture that fetishizes the new(s), and we forget the wealth of human knowledge, wisdom, and transcendence that lives in the annals of what we call “history” – art, literature, philosophy, and so many things that are both timeless and incredibly timely.

Our presentism bias – anchored in the belief that if it isn’t at the top of Google, it doesn’t matter, and if it isn’t Googleable at all, it doesn’t exist – perpetuates our arrogance that no one has ever grappled with the issues we’re grappling with, which of course is tragically untrue.

Maria Popova

A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed all the unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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