Jodi Picoult Quotes

Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true

Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.

Being unbiased is a lot like being humble: as soon as you think you are, you aren’t. Neither are a finite state of being but a continuous struggle to not allow our perspectives poison our opinions.

I think it's important to view the issues on the broadest possible reference plane. In fact, if you firmly believe in any issue, I urge you to read the opposite of it. Most of the time, it'll merely reinforce your original beliefs, but on the rare occasion, it might change your mind.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.

Look at the evidence and to be willing to question your own truths, and to be willing to scrutinize things that you hold dearly because that way, that transparency, that self-awareness, will protect you from ever becoming somebody that whose beliefs somehow make them have myopic vision about what could be.

Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

If I have learned one thing in life, it is never to take any man's own estimate of himself. He could very well be mistaken.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

I'm open to comments. I'm open to objective points of view, because I've been very narrow and very subjective.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

I think it's important to have perspective and to look at what you don't necessarily want to see.

I never read reviews of something I want to see.

Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to 'what is,' whether it's the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity - what I call 'I see, therefore it is.'

Conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, take them.

Consider the speech, not the speaker.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.