Lord Acton Quotes

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

As soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And ... the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.

Human beings will justify anything.

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 passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error.

There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague. Because - and that's a million years ago but we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Who is to say that 5 men 10 years ago were right whereas 5 men looking the other direction today are wrong.

So many men, so many opinions.

Some one has said that most of us don't think, we just occasionally rearrange our prejudices.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

Men who have been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to expect.