Ibn Khaldun Quotes

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

With the experience to judge, one need not pre-judge.

I was trained as journalist never to use the word 'I,' never to put my own opinion there. In fact, if you had a dollar or a euro for every time I use the word 'I,' you would be a poor person. But this is not true in general. I like the idea of being able to stand away and make a judgement.

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

Trust and belief are two prime considerations. You must not allow yourself to be opinionated.

I don't read reviews, because if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad.

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

Opinions should not be allowed to become conclusions

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

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

I always try and distinguish between facts and opinions.

Do not banish reason for inequality; but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.

You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best

The superior man is universally minded and no partisan. The inferior man is a partisan and not universal.

When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

In forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions; else, whatsoever is done or said, will be measured by a wrong rule; like them who have jaundice, to whom everything appears yellow.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.

Thus it is thought that justice is equality; and so it is, but not for all persons, only for those that are equal. Inequality also is thought to be just; and so it is, but not for all, only for the unequal. We make bad mistakes if we neglect this for whom when we are deciding what is just. The reason is that we are making judgements about ourselves, and people are generally bad judges where their own interests are involved.