Top 25 Critical Thinking Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Critical Thinking Quotes from famous people such as David Harsanyi, Daniel Levitin, Martha Nussbaum, Russell Means, Ken Ham, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurat

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their ‘critical thinking.’
David Harsanyi
Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we’ve all made.
Daniel Levitin
Every single university student should study philosophy. You need to lead the examined life and question your beliefs. If you don’t learn critical thinking, then political debate degenerates into a contest of slogans.
Martha Nussbaum
In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education.
Russell Means
One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!
Daniel Levitin
For students, the evolution-creation discussion can be a useful exercise, for it can help develop their critical thinking skills.
Ken Ham
What I’m looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.
Brad Feld
I wish I had had more mentorship and more access, not only for capital, but the critical thinking.
David Cohen
Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with something better than what you planned on in the first place.
Mark Frauenfelder
I think it’s fairly unique to define the end goal of K-12 schooling as helping students become better thinkers, more creative thinkers, and to organize the whole school around creative and critical thinking.
Eva Moskowitz
Kids need time for problem solving, critical thinking, applying knowledge through project-based instruction, working in teams, falling down and getting right back up to figure out what they didn’t understand and why.
Randi Weingarten
Although professors regard improving critical thinking as the most important goal of college, tests reveal that seniors who began their studies with average critical thinking skills have progressed only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen to about the 69th percentile.
Derek Bok
Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.
Hikaru Nakamura
I think a liberal arts education isn’t necessarily about doing something with your degree; it’s about becoming a critical thinker. And I think that critical thinking is so integral to being an actor.
Sarah Gadon
Black girls are punished, many times violently so, for questioning and challenging authority, which is something that is often celebrated and encouraged as a sign of intelligence and critical thinking in white boys.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world’s education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning.
Wendy Kopp
I loved the Sunday funnies, and then, as I got a little bit older, I think my dad recognized that it was important for children, and especially girls, to have that time with their dad so that they could help develop their confidence and their critical thinking skills.
Dana Perino
Critical thinking and curiosity are the key to creativity.
Amala Akkineni
How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.
Brewster Kahle
We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill… it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.
Li Ka-shing
My father was not only a planetary scientist and a great popularizer of science, but he thought very deeply about the world. He was a scholar, he studied history. He taught a class in critical thinking, and he was very, very aware of the directions we might go.
Nick Sagan
I don’t want people to say, ‘Something is true because Tyson says it is true.’ That’s not critical thinking.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
There’s less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level – forget about the media – than ever before. We’ve never needed people to think more critically than now, and they’ve taken a big nap.
Alec Baldwin
Since we don’t know with any certainty what specific aptitudes today’s students will need tomorrow, we need to ensure they have the critical thinking and problem-solving abilities that extend beyond any one technology or program.
Eric Adams
Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn’t measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.
Randi Weingarten