Paul Valery Quotes

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era's dominant ideas.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority

What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up. And if a truth is as old as that, it is also in a fair way to become a lie, gentlemen.

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized.

We're constantly being fed images and being told what to like and what is good, and for the most part, I think people enjoy living that way. It takes a lot of the thinking out of it.

Conventional wisdom is not always the best wisdom.

Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

Traditional wisdom is long on tradition and short on wisdom.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

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.

It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.