Stephen Colbert Quotes

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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

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

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.

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

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.

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.

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

When your voice contradicts reality and truth, the only way to create space for it is to discredit reality and truth.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

The Republicans love the truth, but they hate facts.

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.

I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don't want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves - along with others - about our reasons and motives.

A form of self-delusion.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

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.

The human race's favorite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.