1. We can usually learn much more from people whose views we share than from people whose vies contradict our own. Disagreement can cause stress and inhibit learning.
2. No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge and experience to that field of study.
3. Anyone can make things bigger and more complex. What requires real effort and courage is to move in the opposite direction-in other words, to make things as simple as possible.
4. Students should memories facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have learned only facts have learned very little.
5. Scholars and researches should not be concerned with whether their work makes a contribution to the larger society. It is more important that they pursue their individual interests, however unusual or idiosyncratic those interests may seem.
6. In any academic area or professional field, it is just as important to recognize the limits of our knowledge and understanding as it is to acquire new facts and information.
7. Facts are stubborn things. They cannot be altered by our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions.
8. Students should bring a certain skepticism to whatever they study. They should question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively.
9. There is no such thing as purely objective observation. All observation is subjective; it is always guided by the observers expectations or desires.
10. The human mind will always be superior to machines because machines are only tools of human minds.
11. Critical judgment of work, in any given field has little value unless comes from someone who is an expert in that field.
12. People who pursue their own intellectual interests for purely personal reasons are more likely to benefit the rest of the world than are people who try to act for the public good.
13. Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.
14. The study of ac academic discipline alters the way we perceive the world. After studying the discipline, we see the same world as before, but with different eyes.
15. The way students and scholars interpret the materials they work with in their academic fields is more of personality than of training. Different interpretations come about when people with different personalities look at exactly the same objects, facts, data, or events and see different things.
16. As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more complex and more mysterious.
17. It is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data.