Carl Sagan Quotes

Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.

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

Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

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.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

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.

I'm willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.

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

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.

Cultists do not want to admit they have been manipulated by charisma. Nigerian money scheme victims do not want to accept that they had been swindled. To accept those realities is to accept their own faults. Denial of our own weaknesses is something we all suffer from time to time.

↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.

One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn."