Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.
You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?
Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying
Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.
NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors.
You've got to tell people how it is that you've come to believe what you do.
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one's mind.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.
But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.
What no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
I don't feel like I was argued into the faith, but I feel like the evidence knocked down a succession of objections and issues and questions and doubts that I had, that sort of cleared the pathway for me to come to the faith.
We choose what and how we believe, and our beliefs are tools that we then use to make things happen ... or not.
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
1st Baron Verulam
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.
Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated.
Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here.
Every worldview I chose, it seemed, edged me toward belief.
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
