Libba Bray Quotes

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

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.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

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.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

A form of self-delusion.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

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

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

It's amazing how we can make ourselves believe what we want to.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.