George Orwell Quotes

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.

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.

People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

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

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

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

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

It's amazing how we can make ourselves believe what we want to.

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.

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

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

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.

When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.