China Mieville Quotes

The universities deceive when they say they have no agenda other than to open minds.

We're awash in toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others, is the idea that truth doesn't matter, that truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything. Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people, and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways. The truth really does matter.

People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.

[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

Just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it that way.” -The Host

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.

Random search for data on ... off-chance is hardly scientific. A questionnaire on 'Intellectual Immoralities' was circulated by a well-known institution. 'Intellectual Immorality No. 4' read: 'Generalizing beyond one's data'. [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question no. 4 'Not generalizing beyond one's data.

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.

Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

Too many theorists have a tendency to ignore facts that contradict their convictions.

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again. Most have no common sense, and most never acknowledge that they were wrong.

Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.

When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.