Marquis de Condorcet Quotes

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

The habit patterns of the human mind are very strong and make it seem that the hard way is easy and the easy way is hard.

The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it…. Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.

Don’t see the mind for more than it is, but don’t misread it for all that it can be.

You're chained to you reason ... Understanding is only a very small affair, so very small

Yet, isn't it strange, isn't it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as 'facts.' Yes, I know that in this case one 'fact' was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a 'fact,' and act on it as if it were true.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. One often obtains a clue to a person's nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain impressions.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

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.