## Metadata - Author: [[Alan Jacobs]] - Full Title: How to Think - Category: #books ## Highlights - Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans? “Very simply,” Robinson writes, “it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=163)) - “unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension,” not because we live in a society of conscious and intentional heresy hunters, though to some extent we do, “but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” ([Location 178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=178)) - “when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.” ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=186)) - “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=266)) - To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.” ([Location 397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=397)) - all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we’re right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings. Thinking independently, solitarily, “for ourselves,” is not an option. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MR8V850&location=423))