Benjamin Franklin Quotes

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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

Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

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.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

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

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

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

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

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.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

The point is that 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. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

A form of self-delusion.

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

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

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.

When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

We believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we'd rather pretend doesn't exist.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.