Norman Douglas Quotes

When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.

Humans are lazy but not stupid.

If you assume away most or all of the questions or difficulties, you can persuade yourself of just about anything.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold now.

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes.

A belief is not true because it is useful.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

I guess a little bit of delusion can go a long way.

Human beings will justify anything.