Albert Rutherford

inherent skill needed for critical thinking—asking questions. We need to be able to ask questions, sometimes very difficult ones that cause the personal evaluation of values

The ways that Hitler used propaganda to plant hateful ideas in the minds of his followers and indoctrinate them forever changed the connotation we have for the word propaganda and enforced again and again how important a free and independent press, freedom of speech, and critical thinking really are.

Repetition of short, memorable slogans was key in the marketing of his message. “The receptivity of great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. (…) all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans.”

The questionable scientific “evidence,” in these campaigns made claims such as marijuana turned users into killers and drug addicts. In reality the campaigns were an attempt to get rid of Mexican immigrants.

Businesses and other groups are usually better than individuals in using slow thinking, thus avoiding frequent mistakes because, by their very nature, thinking and change within them takes longer time.

Thinking and knowing are not the same things.

This reaction is behind such powerful reactions as nostalgia and homesickness. Advertisers often capitalize on these emotions, and try to remind us of familiar things to form a connection and make us feel safe with a product.4

The goal of an argumentative debate should always be to find any underlying fallacies or faulty premises, not to destroy the other side

Everyone is a bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart. People love the idea that broad organizations are what is keeping them from achieving their goals, instead of their own flaws and mistakes. This is because humans developed pattern-recognition traits as an evolutionary tool to aid in survival;

However, history is full of strange events—this is how the world works. There are coincidences all the time! This is part of something called "the law of large numbers," where the number of events and circumstances happening in the world every day is so large that strange things are bound to happen.