Too much thinking makes Jack a mental case. Yeah, that’s what turned Stephen Hawkins mad. The Office Values – Microsoft UK Training with David Brent, 2007
You use your brain too much. Sometimes the smartest people don’t think at all. The Office US s6e3: The Promotion, Michael to Jim, NBC 2009
Style is the dress of thoughts. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
But far more numerous was the herd of such
Who think too little and who talk too much. John Dryden, 1631-1700, Absalom and Achitophel
They never taste who always drink;
They always talk, who never think. Matthew Prior, Upon this Passage in Sealigerana, 1740
Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art. Virgil
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. Joshua Reynolds
Descartes was beginning to doubt everything, down to the question of whether he existed at all ... One thing he could be absolutely certain of was the existence of his thinking, doubting mind. He summed it up in a neat philosophical phrase: ‘I think therefore I am’. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion, BBC 2010
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8&9
Thus saith the Lord God; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought. Ezekiel 38:10
The twentieth century, according to Sigmund Freud, would see man’s capacity for both destruction and technology bring us closer to extinction. As his prophecy came close to reality a new breed of thinker emerged who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3: Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
Another thinker would go on to find wickedness not in the individual but in the very structure of society. Stanley Milgram was born in New York to Jewish parents ... He began to ask unprecedented questions about the human capacity for cruelty. ibid.
A group of thinkers came on to the scene who believed that society could be cured and that human behaviour could be improved. One of these was anthropologist Margaret Mead. ibid.
In the latter part of the twentieth century a group of British thinkers would emerge who would offer radical new ideas about what makes humans tick. These thinkers would take their cues not from humans but from animals. Enter Desmond Morris who started his career as a zoologist. ibid.
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour fought out on the airwaves has brought us. We are undoubtedly products of our biology, and the potential for human failing will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our nature. The sophistication of the human brain and the ways in which we live together have given us the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. This after all is what being human is all about. ibid.
There is an image of intellectuals as being cut-off from the real world. Abstract thinkers living a cosy existence in their ivory towers. But with the advent of broadcasting scholars became national celebrities. They became experts at using radio and television to preach their radical views about transforming Britain. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 2/3: The Grand Expeirment
Should we allow governments to secure a better society or place our trust in the individual? And the battle was so bitter we can still feel its scars today. ibid.
Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury Group – a circle of avant-garde intellectuals that included Russell and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Even amongst the high company his genius stood out. ibid.
Like Russell, Keynes was deeply affected by the First World War as he witnessed the tragic fate of the men who returned from the trenches. The government had promised a land fit for heroes. But in the twenties and thirties Keynes could only see poverty and above all unemployment. In 1936 Keynes published his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which overturned all previous economic thinking. It argued governments should spend more not less during hard times to stimulate the economy. ibid.
If the state could spend on armaments in the wartime, why couldn’t it spend money keeping people out of poverty in peacetime? ibid.
And when the day of peace came Keynes’s economic policies were finally put into action. ibid.
Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge. He produced a government report infused with Victorian morality, proposing a social security scheme to combat want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The plan was controversial. ibid.
The new Jerusalem had finally come. The ideas of Keynes and Beveridge triumphed after the war. Britain had close to full employment. A National Health Service. Free schooling for all. The old were given pensions and slums were cleared for new housing. ibid.
One of the world’s greatest unsung heroes – ‘Boole is the father of information technology’ … and he would do this against a backdrop of Ireland’s darkest days. The Genius of George Boole
Nearly two hundred years ago George Boole made a revolutionary discovery … Boole argued that almost every value or question could be reduced to either true or false. A simplification of our world as a basic statement. ibid.
He dedicates every breathing moment to mathematics and in particular to a branch of maths known as calculus. ibid.
And then Boole develops a new branch of mathematics – invariant theory. ibid.
To prove the existence of God … He seeks to prove this by applying to the Bible the process of logical analysis. ibid.
Boole publishes his masterpiece – The Laws of Thought. ibid.
Melvin Hausner recalled: ‘He was always buried in thought. He’d sit in the common room by himself. He could easily walk by you and not see you. He was always muttering to himself. Always whistling. Nash was always thinking ... If he was lying on a table, it was because he was thinking. Just thinking. You see could see he was thinking.
‘He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. A profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a strong compulsion to learn by doing is one of the most reliable signs of genius. He was obsessed with learning from scratch. Milnor recalled, ‘It was as if he wanted to rediscover; for himself, three hundred years of mathematics.’’ ibid.
Rational thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos. John Nash
I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage. Donald Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal 1987
I don’t know what to think any more. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot ***** starring Stephen Brennan & Barry McGovern & Johnny Murphy & Sam McGovern et al, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Vladimir
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they rarely use. Soren Kierkegaard
Change your language and you change your thoughts. Karl Albrecht
In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. Albert Camus