Megan McArdle Quotes

We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make.

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.

Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side.

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

To think that everybody's like you is silly.

We should start off with the premise that people that we're disagreeing with are like ourselves. Try and work out why they think what they think.

If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

Everything is but what we think it.

People you don't like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose.

Any two people have different ideas of what is important.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense.

Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.