Richard Whately Quotes

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

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

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

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

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.

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

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

To seek a justification for a decision already made.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it but that this evidence was starting us in the face all the time.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads.

No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.

I think that there is something that happens, a phenomenon that happens around a conspiracy theory, where if you believe in a conspiracy theory, then every critique of that theory is simply more proof that the conspiracy exists. And I think that that's something that goes on in the person of Donald Trump.

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.

We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases?

I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.