Gertrude Atherton Quotes

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

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.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

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.

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

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

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.

Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.

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.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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.