Daniel Kahneman Quotes

People have perceived dangers and real dangers, but to politicians, it's all the same.

Everything is danger, but we pretend that it's not.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

Stereotypes happen. I try not to embrace them or avoid them.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

Flying is safer than it has been in a long time. It just doesn't seem that way.

In an ideological, polarized political environment, people see the reality that they want to see.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Partisanship shapes the reality that people choose to see.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

Economic growth is based partly on reality and partly on perception.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

Life is a dangerous adventure, says the American, and he is half right: life is dangerous, but it's not an adventure.

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.

The majority of my background is multi-camera format, which is very broad and a very arch perception of reality. Whereas single camera tends to be more truthful and a little more intimate of a medium. Friends was an education in intelligent comedic banter; in intelligent vernacular. It was an education in scene study. It was an education in group dynamic. I came out of there with a masters degree in comedy.

We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.