Errol Morris Quotes

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.

The worst deluded are the self-deluded.

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.

How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.