Cognitive Dissonance Quotes

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

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

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

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.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

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

The primitive simplicity of their [the masses'] minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Almost all stress, tension, anxiety, and frustration, both in life and in work, comes from doing one thing while you believe and value something completely different.