Ask questions stubbornly, very proud men who seeing themselves right without knowing anything about the matter. This shows lack of piety, a tendency to ranting, a weak mind, and excessive vanity. [...] If you hear, or read writing (you object to), do not react with violence until you have proof that what is expressed is wrong. Do not accept that with the enthusiasm of the credulous man either until being wholly convinced of that. In both situations you blind yourself and drift away from truth... Act like a person who has no preconceived views, one ready to know and accept what is right and reject what is wrong. (Ibn Hazm)

Ask questions stubbornly, very proud men who seeing themselves right without knowing anything about the matter. This shows lack of piety, a tendency to ranting, a weak mind, and excessive vanity. [...] If you hear, or read writing (you object to), do not react with violence until you have proof that what is expressed is wrong. Do not accept that with the enthusiasm of the credulous man either until being wholly convinced of that. In both situations you blind yourself and drift away from truth... Act like a person who has no preconceived views, one ready to know and accept what is right and reject what is wrong.

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Related quotes

If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question or the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake, first of all,, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects-his own- in particular. And, unexpectedly among these, the literary objects.

Jacques Derrida

This ideal University of Life ... would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning-not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly "What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.

Alain de Botton

The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it reveals in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognise the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor blighter who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs to. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I believe that communities which lack the feminine influence are apt to fall into abstraction and the madness of systems which, being false, require violence to put into practice. We have, alas, seen too many examples of this. A masculine civilization like that of ancient Greece perishes through politics, metaphysics, and vanity. Women alone can give these doctrinary drones a sense of the real and simple values of the hive. No true civilization is possible without the collaboration of the two sexes, but there can be no real collaboration unless the differences between the sexes are accepted and a mutual respect established.

André Maurois

George Orwell once wrote: "And it's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."

Michael Moore