Kinky Friedman Quotes

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.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

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

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.

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

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

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

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

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

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

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

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

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

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.

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.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.

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