Sarah Josepha Hale Quotes

Most people when they come after you for advice come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.

The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

When we have learned something, there's this thing called belief perseverance. Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them. It's probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

People try to make sense of things, and if they don’t know the answers, they make them up,because for some, a wrong answer is better than none.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced-and sometimes strongly-by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.

There are many people out there who don't even think of themselves as being averse to facts, but the truth is, they are not getting it.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.

It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.