Dogmatist Quotes & Sayings

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist. — Pierre Bayle

She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearing the manifesto of her generation. Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness. Submitting to a generation mentality (to this pride of the herd) has always repelled me. After Miss Broz had developed her provocative argument (I've now heard it at least fifty times from people her age) that all mankind is divided into those who give hitchhikers lifts (human people who love adventure) and those who don't (inhuman people who fear life), I jokingly called her a "dogmatist of the hitch." She answered sharply that she was neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist, that those were all words of ours, that we had invented them, that they belonged to us, and that they were completely alien to them. — Milan Kundera

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The dogmatist will listen to everyone's opinion, and then affirm to himself his godliness. — Rudolf Hess

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, Oh, just let me enjoy the poem. — Robert Penn Warren

If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists
and I am inclined to think it is so
it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool. — Charles Caleb Colton

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without. — Stephen Jay Gould

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ... ; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this' ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic. — Bertrand Russell

I've said that anyone who doesn't contradict himself is a dogmatist, and every dogmatist is a reactionary. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The tolerance of the skeptic ... accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the "dogmatist." — Jean Guitton