Quotes & Sayings About Intellectual Honesty

Scholars may contribute their knowledge or insight to public debate on important issues. They may contribute it in a form that is understandable to a policymaker, or even to the public, consistently with their duty of rigorous intellectual honesty. Scholars should not feel constrained to publish only turgid prose in obscure journals. They should not leave the public debate to those who feel no scruples whatever to conform their claims to the evidence. — Douglas Laycock

But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone "purity," is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity? — Anonymous

I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it. — H.L. Mencken

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment. — Kurt Andersen

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn't make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades. — Eric Metaxas

The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity. — Alfred Kinsey

1924 A revival meeting seems never to get under my skin. Perhaps I am too fish-blooded to enjoy them. But I object not so much to the emotionalism as to the lack of intellectual honesty of the average revival preacher. I do not mean to imply that the evangelists are necessarily consciously dishonest. They just don't know enough about life and history to present the problem of the Christian life in its full meaning. They are always assuming that nothing but an emotional commitment to Christ is needed to save the soul from its sin and chaos. They seem never to realize how many of the miseries of mankind are due not to malice but to misdirected zeal and unbalanced virtue. They never help the people who corrupt family love by making the family a selfish unit in society or those who brutalize industry by excessive devotion to the prudential virtues. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow. — Lynn Margulis

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling
it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument. — Sam Harris

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. — J.B.S. Haldane

These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales
ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors
for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes. — David Bentley Hart

In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research. — Richard J. Foster

The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. — Sam Harris

Deal honestly and objectively with yourself; intellectual honesty and personal courage are the hallmarks of great character. — Brian Tracy

The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind. — Isaiah Berlin

The most important quality of leadership is intellectual honesty. The reality principle - the ability to see the world as it really is, not as you wish it were. — Jack Welch

It is because of the Biblical curse on man's search for knowledge, which has so paralyzed his mind during the past ages, and its detrimental effect upon progress, that makes the Bible the most wicked, the most detestable, the most pernicious, and the most obnoxious book ever published. It has been a curse to the human race.
It is the duty of every brave and honest man and woman to do everything in his and her power to destroy the influence of this utterly stupid and vicious book, with its infantile concept of life and its nonsense concerning the universe. It is their duty to do everything within their power to stop its demoralizing and paralyzing influence upon the life of man.
We will never achieve intellectual liberty until the wickedness of this book has been discarded with the belief in the flatness of the earth. — Joseph Lewis

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.
When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What is childlike humility? It's not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. It's that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think. The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a puppy, or point out loudly that you have a booger hanging out of your nose, is what is required to enter heaven. It is the opposite of ignorance - it is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard. — Todd Burpo

Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith? — C.S. Lewis

I swear that while I live I will do what little I can to preserve and to augment the liberties of man, woman, and child.
It is a question of justice, of mercy, of honesty, of intellectual development. If there is a man in the world who is not willing to give to every human being every right he claims for himself, he is just so much nearer a barbarian than I am. It is a question of honesty. The man who is not willing to give to every other the same intellectual rights he claims for himself, is dishonest, selfish, and brutal. — Robert G. Ingersoll

The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Every man who expresses an honest thought is a soldier in the army of intellectual liberty. — Robert Green Ingersoll

We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success. There should be no place for despondency. The crisis can and must be fought by uniting our intellectual, spiritual and material resources. — Vladimir Putin

To set aside one's prejudices, one's present needs, and one's own self interest in making a decision as a director for a company is an intellectual exercise that takes constant practice. In short, intellectual honesty is a journey and not a destination. — Mervyn King

I would like to raise them as I was. I would like for them to learn naturally, effortlessly, almost without knowing it, that the love of beautiful things, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty are the three essential virtues. This way, they will like things for themselves, will judge for themselves. This way, they will be real men, as there used to be, they won't be fooled by intellectual snobs and political scoundrels. They will know how to live above and outside of a century which is only getting deeper into infamy, lies, and stupidity. I love you my dears because I know that it is because of you that I possess some of these virtues that I wish for them to have. — Sean B. Carroll

In the world I inhabit, there is a shortage of intellectual honesty, but not of intelligence. — Alessandro Baricco

Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which one will give up one's belief. — Imre Lakatos

[I]t struck me how easy it is to bamboozle an uneducated audience if you have prepared beforehand a set of repartees with which to evade awkward questions."
...
"You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion either. We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has an axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone's thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a 'case' with deliberate suppression of his opponent's point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends ... . But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs. — George Orwell

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. — Henry David Thoreau

The root of the matter is a very simple and old fashioned thing ... love or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. — Bertrand Russell

The power of real debate is in the language and intellectual honesty of the debaters, alongside the engagement of spectators. — Ruzwana Bashir

When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone's thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a "case" with deliberate suppression of his opponent's point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends. — George Orwell

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get. — Samuel E. Morison

I think that the 21st-century economy is an economy of people, not of factories. The intellectual aspect in the global economic development has grown immensely. That's why we plan to concentrate on creating additional opportunities for our people to realise their potential. — Vladimir Putin

That my most important values are honesty, empathy, and intellectual curiosity. That I'm unwilling to tolerate women who don't make me happy, no matter how hot they are. — Mark Manson

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty - and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally. — Sam Harris

It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country. — Hermann Hesse

For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity. — Arthur Peacocke

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement. — B.F. Skinner

Mathematics is persistent intellectual honesty. — Moses Aaron Richardson

Thus it is a very serious lapse in scholarly competence and/or intellectual integrity for someone like Dawkins, an Oxford don who sees fit to pour scorn on the scholarly acumen and intellectual honesty of others, to treat the Five Ways as if they constituted Aquinas's complete case for God's existence, to ignore Aquinas's responses to various objections, and to tell his readers that Aquinas gives "absolutely no reason" for certain claims that, as I have said, he actually devotes many hundreds of pages to defending. — Edward Feser

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

Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies
misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. — Janna Levin