thought

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

"La propagande de l'erreur est libre: liberté de pensée!"

"If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era."

"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it."

"“The biggest gift from God to man is a free mind,” [Uyghur-man Örkesh Davlet] said."

"The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect."

"Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution or sanity or reasoned scepticism or on occasion even as courage."

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."

"But arms – instrumentalities, as President Wilson called them – are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas. People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?"

"Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own. In the "unsteepled" places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments with "members unlimited". Against the background of London Dissent, with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time. On the contrary, he is the original yet authentic voice of a long popular tradition. If some of the London Jacobins were strangely unperturbed by the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette it was because they remembered that their own forebears had once executed a king. No one with Bunyan in their bones could have found many of Blake's aphorisms strange: "The strongest poison ever known \ Game from Caesar's laurel crown.""

"The importance of concept maps in expert learning has... been explained. Mappings of processes such as the design process are... related to the acquisition of procedural knowledge. ...[C]oncept maps may come in all shapes and sizes... Hyerle... distinguished between eight types of thinking map. A circle map helps define words or things in context and presents points of view. Bubble maps describe emotional, sensory and logical qualities. For example, at their center in a circle might be a heroic person, and from the center other circles describe the characteristics of the hero. Tree maps show relationships between main ideas and supporting details. Block schematic diagrams are examples of flow diagrams... Engineers often use such maps to show causes and effects as well as to predict outcomes. Maps may also be used to form analogies or metaphors and these are often used to try and explain s. ...Danserau and Newbern... called bubble maps 'node' maps. The nodes contain the central ideas. The links... show relationships between the nodes. ...They argued that concept maps should provide easy illustrations of complex relationships, less work clutter, be easy to remember, and easy to navigate. ...McAleese and Cowan warned that concept maps are only useful to the learner, if they are constructed by the learner. It is a view that is beginning to be taken up by the engineering community... [S]tudent constructed maps become the navigational tool that allows them to explore relevant content and expand their maps..."

"[I]n addition to showing what knowledge a student holds, concept maps also illustrate how that knowledge is arranged in the student’s mind."

"The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the research on a... form of knowledge representation, the knowledge map, and to point to areas of future research... and to some... practical implications... Other forms of graphical representation such as concept mapping... have been widely used in science education research... Knowledge maps are node-link representations in which ideas are located in nodes and connected to other related ideas through a series of labeled links. They differ from other similar representations such as mind maps, concept maps, and graphic organizers in the deliberate use of a common set of labeled links that connect ideas. Some links are domain specific (e.g., function is very useful for some topic domains...) whereas other links (e.g., part) are more broadly used. Links have arrowheads to indicate the direction of the relationship between ideas."

"It is in these shimmering and incessant embraces that the infinite patterns, the infinite Maps of the Mind, are created, nurtured and grown. Radiant Thinking reflects your internal structure and processes. The Mind Map (Concept Map) is your external mirror of your own radiant thinking and allows you to access this vast thinking powerhouse."

"The focus of this investigation is on the use of thinking maps as tools for students and teachers in classrooms from kindergarten through graduation. Thinking maps are eight fundamental thinking processes represented and activated by semantic maps [Circle, Bubble, Double Bubble, Tree, Brace, Flow, Multi-Flow and Bridge]... This distinct set of visual tools is used for inter-actively connecting, sharing and reflecting on information for personal, interpersonal, and social understandings. ...[S]tudents who are taught how to use this set of tools will be helped in becoming independent and interdependent learners. [T]hey... [will] have a common visual language in the classroom for connecting and seeing what they are thinking, for deepening dialogue, and for assessing how they are thinking and learning. ...This investigation of thinking maps as student-centered tools is... a practical response to a continuing educational problem... defining the relationship between teachers and students... Since the advent of public school education this relationship has been securely entrenched in teacher lecture and the rote repetition of lessons by students. ...[T]he teacher-talk and student-listen relationship that had been criticized by progressive educators for generations has finally become recognized to be at the heart of our educational problem."

"An important issue is the virtual nature of the concept map. ...[T]he “map” can exist in n-dimensional space. ...[There are] two “laws” of concept maps. [C]oncept models are: "L1: represented using the least number of concept labels and relationships - for the current understanding". This leads to a second law: "L2: each and every concept label signifies an indeterminate number of other related concept labels". Concept maps have to be seen in virtual space – not planar or Cartesian space. The relationships between nodes can be thought of as "deep" as opposed to "surface" linkages. The relationship of concepts - one to another - can be understood in terms of structural knowledge. ...Dave Jonassen has made a plausible case that concept maps provide a measure of structural knowledge. Such... "knowledge of the interrelationships of ideas with a knowledge domain”... suggests that there may be an isomorphic relationship between what is known by the learner and... the external representation - the map. Jonassen, et al (1998) seem to say that the map is a dynamic construction that comes about as a result of the experience of mapping. ..."mindtools represent a constructivist use of technology... the process of how we construct knowledge"... [I]n another paper [he] claims "...concept maps ...are the spatial representations of concepts and their interrelationships that are intended to represent the knowledge structures that humans store in their minds..." (Jonassen et al 1993...) This is the "representational" view."

"Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. Student[s] are given either a list of terms or overall topics, and are told to link them based on their assessment of importance and relation. Based on the work of J. Turns, the concept map is an assessment tool based on nodes and arcs. Nodes are the individual words or phrases that the student is associating. Arcs connect the nodes with one another, typically in an outward fashion, in which there are more nodes the further one gets from the center node. The most important and/or central part of the concept map is placed in the center node. Connected outwards from the center node are the terms that the student deems to be a subset or close relation of the center term. ...[W]e took a series of steps that simplified the complex and diverse concept maps that were created by the students. The first method was to encode the data into an Excel file in order to count the occurrences of each word as a set towards creating a single concept map that embodied the perspectives of the class. We weighted a word based on a point system that rewarded terms that were closer to the center of the concept map."

"Because meaningful learning proceeds most easily when new concepts or concept meanings are subsumed under broader, more inclusive concepts, concept maps should be hierarchical; that is, the more general, more inclusive concepts should be at the top of the map, with progressively more specific, less inclusive concepts arranged below them. ...[I]t is sometimes helpful to include at the base of the concept map specific objects or events to illustrate the origins of the concept meaning ..."

"[D]o students correctly learn their discipline and properly frame it cognitively so that they use it in practice? Concept maps and concept inventories can examine this from macro and micro perspectives. Concept mapping is an established tool... designed to measure conceptual organization, or how students organized the knowledge they have learned (or not learned). These maps are... graphical organizers for thoughts, theories, and/or concepts in a particular discipline... Understanding is schematically represented by creating a hierarchy of ideas of concepts linked together through branches of subconcepts, with interrelationships indicated by additional branches or cross-links... [T]he difficulty in using them for assessment has been in their scoring. ...Maps usually are scored by counting concepts, links, and hierarchies. Recently more sophisticated approaches have appeared that better facilitate their use as an outcome assessment tool. ...Concept inventories for various engineering subject areas have been developed to measure... conceptual understanding... of such fundamental, small-scale phenomena as heat, light, diffusion, chemical reactions, and electricity..."

"David Nelson Hyerle, "Thinking Maps as Tools for Multiple Modes of Understanding" (1993) PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley."

"Though concept maps can take many forms, they commonly include both ‘nodes’ (concepts) and ‘arcs’ (linking lines denoting relationships)... Concept maps are great for exploring what knowledge students are bringing to your class. ...[T]ry asking your students to create concept maps on one or more... topics. Then review these for patterns in how the students are depicting the topics (are they missing key connections to other ideas? Are they drawing erroneous relationships?), and make changes to your lesson plans accordingly."

"Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web."

"Thinking Maps... are no different from other languages that have been developed within or across cultures: Languages are inherently made by humans and thus are arbitrary and incomplete, and have grey areas and ambiguous "rules" that sometimes govern strange usage. But we have never had... a language of cognition... a language for generating patterns of thinking based on human cognitive structures. Certainly, our spoken and written and mathematical languages are all based on being able to represent out thinking, ideas, and concepts but not for explicitly representing thinking as patterns. ...The thinking patterns are embedded in the linearity of text, and you need to work a bit to dig them out. ...When we Google directions to a place ...we get both the linear, line-by-line directions and a visual map showing the network of ...roads ...offering a multitude of options. Thinking Maps offer mental maps of how we are thinking and new routes for understanding."

"Concept maps can be classified into three types: object maps, verbal maps, and spatial maps corresponding to three distinct styles of learning and communication. According to neuropsychologists Olysa Blazhenkova and Maria Kozhevnikov, object learners and communicators are found among artists and multi-media persons who process information through colorful, concrete, multi-dimensional, and multi-sensory images. The verbal style of communicating and processing of information, according to the media scholar, Marshall McLuhan, has dominated Western learning for centuries... This cognitive style is opposed to the object style and a third type, spatial style in that spatial learners, as in the case of object learners, process information non-verbally, and through images."

"Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. ...Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning. ...[C]oncepts are represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most inclusive, most general concepts at the top of the map and the more specific, less general concepts arranged hierarchically below. ...[I]t is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular... focus question. ...Cross-links help us see how a concept in one domain... on the map is related to a concept in another domain... on the map. In the creation of new knowledge, cross-links often represent creative leaps [by] the knowledge producer. ...[S]pecific examples of events or objects... help to clarify the meaning of a given concept. ...Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course of Novak’s research program... to follow and understand changes in children’s knowledge of science... [T]he researchers... found it difficult to identify specific changes in the children’s understanding... by examination of interview transcripts. ...Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s knowledge in the form of a concept map."

"Sow a thought and reap an act."

"Old things need not be therefore true, O brother men, nor yet the new; Ah! still awhile the old thought retain, And yet consider it again!"

"Cujusvis hominis est errare; nullius, nisi insipientis, in errore perseverare. Posteriores enim cogitationes (ut aiunt) sapientiores solent esse."

"Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm."

"Reader! — You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which every man should be'master, the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is every man's interest and duty to acquire, namely, self-knowledge: or to what end was man alone, of all animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of self-consciousness?"

"Qui sait si l'on ne verra pas que le phosphore et l'esprit vont ensemble?"

"Think about the great thinkers of our time and those times before and in antiquity. Think about Aristotle, Plato and Socrates and Maimonides and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Rodin and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison and Oprah Winfrey and those liberation thinkers like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Marcus Garvey and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. Think about it my brothers and sisters, Cesar Chavez and George Washington Carver and Booker T Washington, Adam Clayton Powell ectera. Think about them! They were [thinkers]. Pitful our generation and our people today. Here it is 2008, and we're worse off now than we've ever been because our young people do not have the ability to — Think about it! How pitiful we are, here they are on drugs, on heroin, on cocaine, alcoholics. Here they are at the disposal of these kingpins and ectera, because they can't. Here they are making gangs families because they can't."

"With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought."

"There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

"And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house... he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind."

"My thoughts ran a wool-gathering."

"Thought once awakened does not again slumber."

"That neither our Thoughts, nor Passions, nor Ideas formed by the Imagination, exist without the Mind, is what every Body will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various Sensations or Ideas imprinted on the Sense... cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving them... For as to what is said of the absolute Existence of unthinking Things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their Esse is Percipi, nor is it possible they should have any Existence, out of the Minds or thinking Things which perceive them."

""I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principle. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And, consequently, any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure."

"Thought is something limitless and independent, and has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself. … What was mingled with it would have prevented it from having power over anything in the way in which it does. … For it is the finest of all things and the purest."

"Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?"

"Our growing thought Makes growing revelation."

"For thoughts are so great—aren't they, sir? They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood."

"The power of Thought,—the magic of the Mind!"

"The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom."

"Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world."

"Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first."

"The hardest thing in the world is to think, that is, to think real thought."

"Those who refuse the long drudgery of thought, and think with the heart rather than with the head, are ever the most fiercely dogmatic in their tone."