Michael Shermer Quotes

I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

It might sound goofy, but I do believe that emotions have power. We're all driven by something, and most of that is emotional reaction.

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

I just love thinking about what makes people tick

You are 100% emotional in everything you think, feel and decide. You decide emotionally and justify logically.

The best movies are made from a point of view of an understanding of human nature and an understanding of history and an understanding of what motivates people, of what makes a good movie from an emotional place.

It's not that big a mystery about types. It's not even that big a mystery why so many people are picking up on things now. It's like we were talking about the primitive thing before and all that. Nothing has really changed much. The things that have changed are like we're on the noon now. There are more buildings now. But we're still basically two monkeys sitting here.

And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?

You need emotional content.

Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.

I tend to come from a more psychological - that's sort of my passion. I'm interested in the psychology of politics as well - and obviously I'm interested in what's going on in the world - but my passion is more the psychology of people.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

Anyone who says he is not emotional is not getting what he should out of life.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.