Quotes on Thinking

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.

Above all, I am motivated by the most mysterious drive we ever experience -that of love - I don't think there's any influence on my life that compares with love.

I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.

The most important thing is to have a good relationship with the bike... you have to understand what she wants. I think of a motorcycle as a woman, and I know that sounds silly, but it's true.

You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.

Some people care too much. I think it's called love.

...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking.

To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.

We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions.

I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.

In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.

Ladylike is the beastliest word there is, I think. If a girl isn't a lady, it isn't worth while to be only like one, she'd better let it alone and be a free and happy bounder.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.