Guy P. Harrison Quotes

Don't worry about winning debates and beating up people in heated arguments. That stuff is rarely enjoyable or productive. Instead offer a helping hand. Be positive. Teach. Try to inspire people to think better for their own good.

Making critical thinking a national educational norm is the cognitive vaccine America needs to have a fighting chance of maintaining sufficient sanity. Good thinking prevents and alleviates bad thinking.

Spending a day inside an ornate palace of emotion such as the Louvre or Metropolitan Museum of Art is proof that even the worst of our wars, oppression, and neglect cannot erase the beauty we humans routinely conjure out of thin air. We may hate, but we love, too. Destroyers and creators, that's us. … Visit museums. Support museums. Love museums. They are necessary reflections in the mirror, the biased but revelatory autobiographies of a species still seeking to know itself.

Some museums are blatant trophy rooms designed to show off only the best of ourselves. This is a good thing, too. We need it. A great art museum, for example, reassures me that, no matter what comes, humankind has not been a total waste of atoms.

“Good thinking and science are the fundamental prerequisites to building a better world for ourselves and the life we share it with. So much that harms us, so much of our pain is self-inflicted and unnecessary, the result of irrational fears and misperceptions. Most people on Earth right now do not know who we are, how we got here, how we depend on countless lifeforms all around us, how the universe works, and so on. All of our wars, racism, hate, fear, destruction and neglect are exactly what one would expect from an intelligent species with no self-awareness. We must find a way to teach our children, all children, the fundamental knowledge of who we are and what the universe is. Only then, can we finally wake up, grow up, and be our best.“

Museums are my cathedrals. Artifacts in glass cases are my sacred relics. I truly believe I have felt something close to religious fervor inside some of these buildings. I even feel that I have experienced the occasional transcendent moment inside a museum.

Appreciate the magnificent brain you possess. Protect and nurture it. Strive to be a good skeptic and critical thinker so that fewer hours of your precious life will be squandered on dead-end beliefs. Always try to think like a scientist so that you might better know truth from fiction.

Every person is a collective, a vast and complex gathering of interdependent life. Any description of 'human' must acknowledge these intimate strangers. Our bond with microbes is such that they are not so much riders, parasites, and assistants as part human. And we, it's becoming increasingly clear, may need to begin thinking of ourselves as part microbe.

Scientists believe that walking has this effect of enhancing creativity because it loosens the restraints and filters that our brains place on memory when we focus on a task. When one dedicates mental effort to something, the brain tries to help by shutting down what it deems to be irrelevant distractions from within. Walking can relax the mind enough to reduce these barriers and allow some unrelated memories to emerge. This is precisely what we want in order to maximize creativity. It helps when disconnected memories and disparate bits of information come forward, because they are often the source of new and unique ideas.

This is not how the 21st century was supposed to be going for us. As a child nurtured on Star Trek reruns, I imagined our species solving poverty, ending war, and colonizing other worlds by now. Silly me. Here I am today discussing a popular belief that reptilian extraterrestrials reside in Buckingham Palace.

Humility is the key. If you are an arrogant, condescending skeptic then you are doing it wrong. Science and critical thinking rest upon a premise that says anyone can be wrong about anything. A good thinker is humble. We also must be mindful of the fact that very intelligent people can hold very dumb beliefs. It's a human condition. Irrational believers are not inferior people; they simply made a misstep somewhere along the way in their thinking.

We are not a collection of subspecies separated by biological canyons. Neither nature nor supernatural design imposed the different and often contradictory racial classification systems used around the world.

The basic understanding of evolution that I carry around in my head enhances my life. I've done night dives in the Caribbean, 130 feet down, and there were moments when I might have felt like an astronaut visiting some alien planet filled with exotic life. But I knew better. I was home and all the weird and wonderful lifeforms around me were family. The magnificence and importance of nature are clarified and amplified in light of the awareness of shared ancestors and a common origin. I understand that I'm inside the big beautiful blur of life that surrounds our world. And that makes the ride even more amazing.

All those Creationism vs. Evolution debates are misaligned and misleading. The real debate should be Creationism vs. Abiogenesis. Creationism is a belief about a supernatural origin of life. Evolution is a theory about how life changes over time. Those are not the same things. Abiogenesis is the science of life's origin that logically stands in direct opposition to creationism.

It's never too late to think.