Thomas Sowell Quotes

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

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.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

Who wants to hear that he is wrong when he can be told that he is right? …. We are losing the ability to change our mind because of our media.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn't universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

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.

Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself.

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.

They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

People try to make sense of things, and if they don’t know the answers, they make them up,because for some, a wrong answer is better than none.

The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

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.