Scott Adams Quotes

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

…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.

Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

From time to time, everyone distorts. We all tend to believe what supports our side of the question and doubt what weakens it. When we are under stress, we tend to believe what we need to believe.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

A form of self-delusion.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

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

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

It's amazing how we can make ourselves believe what we want to.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.