Gloria Steinem Quotes

The left brain is responsible for making order out of chaos, for making sense of things in the world that don't always add up. To do this, it often makes up stories, fantastic confabulations in some cases, just to be able to explain what we're experiencing.

I think we think in terms of stories.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

You know, people make up a lot of different stories about a lot of different things.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

The first thing, the first element of a story that people hear, they believe it. Whether it's right or wrong.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story.

Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical-it is also emotional.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.

Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts.

Statistics and numbers are no good unless you have good people to analyse and then interpret their meaning and importance.

People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.