Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

People believe what they want to believe.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

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.

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.

Humans are lazy but not stupid.

Human beings will justify anything.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

We are eager to believe that others are flawed because we are eager to believe in what we wish for.

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.