Jonathan Swift Quotes

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

From time to time, everyone distorts. We all tend to believe what supports our side of the question and doubt what weakens it. When we are under stress, we tend to believe what we need to believe.

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.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

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.

All men are liable to error; and most men, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something

Interest makes all seem reason that leads to it.

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.

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

The paradigm helps a person identify the thought system, which is almost always false, that is behind the rationale for the continuation of excuses. It helps them really look at excuses from an objective point of view and realize that everything they've been thinking is just as likely to be not true as it is to be true.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.