Cognitive Conflict Quotes

Faith and reason overpower each other throughout one's life, which results in contradiction, but the conflict never ceases in any sphere.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over philosophy.

When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

How do you fight an idea—especially a new idea?

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

I want my books to explore motives which make people think, 'Wow! Imagine the psychological state you'd have to be in for that to be your motive!' Whereas things like blackmail, jealousy - they're rational reasons for committing murder.

The pace at which science has progressed has been too fast for human behaviour to adapt to it. As I said we are still apes. A part of our brain is still a paleo-brain and many of the reactions come from our fight or flight instinct. As long as this part of the brain can take over control the rational part of the brain (we will face these problems).

It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.

I think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can't have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can't have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.

There are two contrary impulses which govern this man's brain-the one sane, and the other eccentric. They alternate at regular intervals.

The true knowledge of good and evil arouses disturbances of the mind

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know America is better than every other country.

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.

If you've ever liked an artist or someone who then does something or is accused of something extremely corrupt, and your moral conscience won't allow you to accept that artist, the truth is then that creates a void in your life. Because then something you loved was taken from you.

The problem of moral change would appear to be one of presenting stimuli which are both sufficiently incongruous as to stimulate conflict in the child's existing stage schemata and sufficiently congruous as to be assimilable with some accomodative effort.

The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.

The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.