Antony Jay Quotes

Self delusion is not a good basis for making important policy.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold now.

A belief is not true because it is useful.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

No one is served or benefitted by believing in false or faulty ideas.

One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.