Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

There are many people out there who don't even think of themselves as being averse to facts, but the truth is, they are not getting it.

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.

The reason facts don’t change most people’s opinions is because most people don’t use facts to form their opinions. They use their opinions to form their “facts.”

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

People believe what they want to believe.

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

If people believe something is true, then it is even if it isn't.

The Republicans love the truth, but they hate facts.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.

The funny response to 'One Mississippi' continues to be that people don't know what is true and what's fiction.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

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

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

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

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I know all too well that people only see what they want to see and remember only what they want to remember.

We are anxious when there is a dissonance between our "knowledge" and the perceivable facts. Since our "knowledge" is not to be doubted or questioned, it is the facts that have to be altered.

You believe what you want to believe

We see what we want to believe.