Dan Barker Quotes

...nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

It's so hard to fight against someone who is stuck in what they believe whether you agree with it or not.

We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they'll call you a trouble-maker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.

Fundamental assumptions in general and scientific assumptions in particular are so hard to overturn because they are based on belief. Beliefs are so hard to overcome because they are irrational and therefore do not yield to logical argument.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

Believing is such a comfort that it's hard to give up a belief just because it isn't true.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

I believe that I have created a lot of cognitive dissonance in the minds of people who are comfortable with stereotypes.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

When you change what you believe, you change what you do.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.

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.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.