Howard Jacobson Quotes

So much is man the slave of his heart that he will shut his eyes to what does not please him and believe all that he hopes.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

People just see what they want to see.

Most people see what they want to, or at least what they expect to.

Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.

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

Maybe you just saw what you wanted to see. Or maybe you justfelt what you wanted to feel.

Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.

People are going to believe what they want to believe.

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.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

The point is that 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. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

The blind see what they want to see.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't.