James Clavell Quotes

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.

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

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

You believe what you want to believe

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive... The unexpected is usually not received at all.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

A man sees what he wants to see, And disregards the rest.

When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.

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.

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

We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.

Every time you think the problem is 'out there,' that very thought is the problem.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

People believe what they want to believe.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

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

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

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.

People just see what they want to see.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.