Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

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

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

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

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.

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

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

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

The point is that 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. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

A form of self-delusion.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

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.

Belief is a deception you play upon yourself.

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.

Believing is such a comfort that it's hard to give up a belief just because it isn't true.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

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.

But what if...what if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn’t even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.