Thomas Huxley Quotes

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

… people reject the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.

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

I like to go after the foibles, basically of beliefs that are held without question. If people still want to believe in their stuff after that, that's great - as long as they just have a chance to step back and look at it for a second. Sometimes, you don't even realize what you've been thinking for 20 years.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.

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.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

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

Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.

We leap to conclusions and remember those conclusions as fact. We react on our own prejudices but don't always recognize them as such.

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

The reason facts don’t change most people’s opinions is because most people don’t use facts to form their opinions. They use their opinions to form their “facts.”