Daniel Kahneman Quotes

I think debate is good. Everyone has an opinion, and it's definitely healthy to voice those.

Not everyone agrees. If you disagree with me, I want you to tell me, and I'm going to come back and tell you why it's my opinion.

I invite a variety people on my show with wide-ranging opinions - sometimes even my jaw hits the floor, too - but I let them speak. Whether it's left, right, or center, I want to expose my viewers to other perspectives. Agree with them or not, the nation needs to listen.

If you're going to have an exchange of ideas, the only thing you can do is to meet people face-to-face in front of a crowd who may think differently than you do. I mean, that's what democracy is about, isn't it?

I'd ask people to keep in mind the idea that if you really understand something, it's even more important for you to consider the possibility of your wrongness. Even if it takes someone dumber than you to point that out.

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

I'd much rather work with people that are tricky and difficult than people that just say yes to everything.

Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

I'm a person that can get along with people. I like people who believe passionately in things even if they're not the things I agree with.

In order to understand people, we have to understand their way of life and approach. If we wish to convince them, we have to use their language in the narrow sense of the mind. Something that goes even much further than that is not the appeal to logic and reason, but some kind of emotional awareness of the other people.

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

When you respond to an unreasonable person by getting emotional, you give them victory. How do you manage unreasonable people? You dismiss them. Like shadows

One of the greatest values of controversy is its revealing nature. The real issues at stake come into the open and have the possibility of being reconciled.

There are some people as obtuse in recognizing an argument as they are in appreciating wit. You couldn't drive it into their heads with a hammer.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

The internet tends to make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

In my couple of books, including Going Clear, the book about Scientology, I thought it seemed appropriate at the end of the book to help the reader frame things. Because we've gone through the history, and there's likely conflictual feelings in the reader's mind. The reader may not agree with me, but I don't try to influence the reader's judgment. I know everybody who picks this book up already has a decided opinion. But my goal is to open the reader's mind a little bit to alternative narratives.

If there's something bothering me in the business end of things with people I work with, I just say it right out.

the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

I think there are a lot of people who feel very passionate about needing to have an open debate. And I think it's a real sign of leadership that the press needs to be actually standing up for that.

You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.