Illusory Superiority Quotes

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

How come those who know the least know it the loudest?

People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.

The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.

Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

We're just a conceited, naked ape. But in our minds we're some sort of "divine legend," and we see ourselves as some sort of god. That we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and who will die and what will be destroyed and what will be saved. But the fact is we're just a bunch of primates out of control.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

We are never so easily deceived as when we imagine we are deceiving others.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

I think many people have an illusion of success based on entering in at a level that's higher than their experiences.

Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.

A form of self-delusion.

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.

Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.