Katharine Viner Quotes

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

You must understand that seeing is believing, but also know that believing is seeing.

People believe what they want to believe.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

I think the basic problem is that everybody thinks they know what the truth is, and sometimes they're even distorting the truth to make their arguments.

She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

Ten percent of the American population thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Those are the people that have not learned the skill of filtering information from the vast barrage of inaccurate information that we're all faced with everyday. I think that's a very 21st century skill.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

Our analysis of truth and falsehood, or of the nature of judgment, is not very likely to be influenced by our hopes and fears.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

A lot of stories that aren't true get out into the mainstream, and it's hard to correct that. People want to hear what they already believe.

Just because something doesn't confirm your existing beliefs does not mean it's a hoax.

Lying in the political sphere has gotten out of hand, and because people tend to dismiss things that challenge their preconceived notions of the world, fact checkers can only play a small part in remedying the problem.

In the era of President Trump, we've gone from believing things that are 'true enough' to believing things that aren't true at all, and can be demonstrably proven so.

In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.

What we believe, we see.