Straight line Quote by Thomas M. Nichols

“Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument. Education” quote by Thomas M. Nichols — Download Open image

““Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument. Education””

Thomas M. Nichols

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Straight line

More by Thomas M. Nichols

“Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights or being sent to war. Students now build majestic Everests from the smallest molehills, and they descend into hysteria over pranks and hoaxes. In the midst of it all, the students are learning that emotion and volume can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer,” because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer than 1…

Thomas M. Nichols

“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason…

Thomas M. Nichols

“If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than what they want, it is difficult to put too much blame on policymakers and their expert advisers for being confused themselves. How can a republic function if the people who have sent their representatives to decide questions of…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture,…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The requirements of a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous degree in the humanities can be a different matter than a major in communications or visual arts or—as much as it pains me to say it—political science. Every campus has “default majors,” chosen when a student has no real idea…

Thomas M. Nichols

“In 2015, a Massachusetts accountant named Stephen Pasceri lost his seventy-eight-year-old mother to cardiovascular disease. Mrs. Pasceri had a long history of health trouble, including emphysema, and died after an operation to repair a heart valve. Pasceri, however, was convinced that one of his mother’s doctors, Michael Davidson—the director of endovascular cardiac surgery at a top Boston hospital and a…

Thomas M. Nichols

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.”

Michael Wolff

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Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

Andrew Davies

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“I'd watch his smooth chest rise and fall with each steady breath, I'd watch the pulsating of his stomach when he laughed, and I'd never forget to make a comment or two about the wispy trail of grey fuzz that lined up perfectly centre with his body - and I thought that straight lines didn't exist in nature. "Look at…

Ashley Newell

In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.

Will Durant

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“Do More. Be More. You were made for more! Take all the chances and leaps. Every single step of the journey is a maze and never a straight line. You will sometimes take the wrong turns, make some bad choices, become helplessly confused and in need of direction, but guess what? As long as you don't give quitting a second…

Chinonye J. Chidolue

“A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position, so Roithamer had written.”

Thomas Bernhard

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A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Mark Twain

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“Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid…

David Livermore

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces…

Kelly Miller

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The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Victor Hugo

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“Chapter One: The world is flat. I know it is, because for the last five hours the view has been exactly the same. Only the sun has done any traveling, working its long shadows through straight lines of harvested cotton. A few crows shop the furrowed rows for worms, weevils, and grasshoppers. One hops over to inspect the truck I'm…

R.P. Dahlke