Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

People are more complicated than you give them credit for.

This is what confuses me. People say, 'I believe that we landed on the Moon' but then they find it really far fetched that there can't be other planets where little men haven't travelled to ours.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

I wouldn't play the normal girl. I don't think that that's interesting or realistic, as far as how human beings really are.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

It is impossible to get anywhere without sinning against reason.

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

People want to ignore what they can't understand. They're looking for logic at any cost.

. . . a statement that is repugnant to one's beliefs can be as true as one that is pleasurable.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

Just because something seems impossible doesn't make it untrue.

Forceful actions arising from erroneous beliefs often create social effects that confirm the misbeliefs

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.