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WHY a Thinking Environment Matters
Thinking for yourself
is the thing on which
everything else depends.
Until we are free to think for ourselves,
our dreams are not free to unfold.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
