Errol Morris Quotes

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

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.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

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

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

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

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.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

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.

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

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 have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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.

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.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

A form of self-delusion.

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

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

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

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

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.