Freeman Dyson Quotes

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Avoid false choices driven by ideology.

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments.

Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

We tend to believe our own propaganda a little too completely.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

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

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

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

A big part of the problem that we face today is that our children have been taught at schools that every idea is right, that no one should criticize others' positions, no matter how odious.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.