Dan Ariely Quotes

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

No man can lose what he never had.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

The persecuting spirit has its origin... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.

It feels right. But it's emotional. Saying goodbye to anything you've done that long is hard.

The Right-wingers everywhere take themselves too seriously, whether in the U.S. or the U.K. And, by the way, so does the Left. The Left can take itself a little too seriously as well.

If you ever want something badly, let it go. If it comes back to you, then it's yours forever. If it doesn't, then it was never yours to begin with.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.

Politicians are trapped in their own views.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

You could as soon scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a professed Democrat

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

Partisanship shapes the reality that people choose to see.

I guess many of us are just prone to see what the other side is up to, maybe to reinforce our own worldviews and feel confident that our ideology is right and theirs is wrong.

If you acquire things, you have to let them go.

I still strongly feel that a lot of people who participated in Gamergate, who participated in this sort of thing, are doing so because they go into it with - they'll believe the version of events that fits their world view.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

The things that are ours cannot be given away, or taken away, or lost. We break our hearts, all of us, trying to keep things that do not belong to us — and to which we have no right.

We can only lose what we have first claimed.

I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.