John Batiste Quotes

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it but that this evidence was starting us in the face all the time.

The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.

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

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

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.

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

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

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

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.

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

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.

A man sees what he wants to see, And disregards the rest.

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.