Top 15 Guy P. Harrison Quotes

The crucial ever-present factor in 2020 was critical thinking. Those who thought well were less likely to tumble into the rabbit holes of QAnon, COVID is a hoax, 5-G towers help spread the virus, racism is scientific, hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, demon sperm is a problem, tracking devices are in vaccines, mass election fraud, etc. The ability and willingness to lean toward evidence and logic rather than side with blind trust and emotion was the key metric behind the madness.

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.

“This is an exciting moment in human history. Collectively, as a species, we are standing at the mouth of the deepest and darkest cave of all. As we lean in and turn on the flashlight, we can be confident that wonderful secrets await.

The human brain is evolution's most magnificent disaster, a beautiful and glorious cesspool of brilliant analytical powers, infinite creativity, and pure madness.

QAnon is a claim so extraordinarily vacuous that it can almost serve as the perfect litmus test for the pathological absence of critical thinking.

Evolution does not mean improvement. There is no ladder of progress, no foresight, no plan, no goal. Evolution is the unintelligent and indifferent process of life changing over time. It doesn't prepare lifeforms for the future. It can't because the future is unknown. With evolution, the only winning is being alive right now and the only losing is being extinct. Every species on Earth today is tied for first. We can't rank contemporary lifeforms as more or less evolved than others. And we can't rank the long-term survivability of species because today's big flashy advantage could be tomorrow's death sentence. The mighty human brain, for example, might turn out to be a doomsday device. If we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons then big primate brains would have been just another evolutionary dead-end.

I am confident that we will continue to move toward greater political and legal freedoms, but with many ups and downs along the way. However, we may find that total freedom or something close to it is a difficult challenge, too. Winning freedom of thought and action is one thing, deciding what to do with it will be quite another.

“It’s scary to think about, but we may finally find unity as a species in self-destruction. The first minute of World War III will render nations, races, and religions meaningless concepts because the first thing to die in nuclear fire will be all our beloved imaginary borders."

When we jump to a conclusion before doing research, we tend to look for evidence that supports our beliefs and ignore facts that contradict them. This deprives us of the opportunity to grow our knowledge.

But even bad museums can have value. The Creation Museum (Kentucky, USA), for example, may be a vulgar monument to pseudoscience and deception, but it can teach us important things about American culture and humankind in general. I visited museums in a couple of communist countries that were like supervolcanoes of absurd propaganda. But they made me think more about patriotism and the national mythologies of all countries.

Our present inability to define life succinctly, logically and consistently is a byproduct of something we can be grateful for. The difficulty exists because living and nonliving matter are intimately tangled as partners in the same grand game. Mere being is the big show. We live inside of and are part of a universe that is exciting and endlessly fascinating. All of it together—stars, planets, moons, rocks, molecules, atoms, and 'life'—make the spectacle. What's going on down at the quantum level, as well as dark energy and dark matter, makes clear that nonlife is no less amazing and surprising than life. The fact that the two realms blur from one to the other only makes learning and discovery more thrilling. Yes, we belong to a cool clique called life, with its blurry borders and loose membership requirements, but we also belong to a larger and even more exciting club called existence.

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.

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.

Intelligent design is intellectual surrender. Not understanding how something works or how it came to be is not an answer. Our current ignorance should only be motivation to keep working the problems. Everything is irreducibly complex—until a scientist figures it out.

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.