Darren Remington Quotes

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

We perceive through our senses a person, a situation or an event, and in an instant, we project our mental models - our fears, background and experiences - onto that perception. This often results in cognitive errors, which means we judge and respond incorrectly.

Our pride is tied up in being right. We tend to favor data that confirm our beliefs, so we don't see alternatives. Too often, leaders practice defense routines that become self-reinforcing.

The capacity of this body for self delusion appears to this Senator to be unlimited.

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

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

If you have a pre-conceived idea of the world, you edit information. When it leads you down a certain road, you don't challenge your own beliefs.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it but that this evidence was starting us in the face all the time.

Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns.

People believe what they want to believe.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

... imagination robs us in great measure of reality...

Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.

Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see - not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.