George Orwell Quotes

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

No one is served or benefitted by believing in false or faulty ideas.

I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

The public are not stupid.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

Self delusion is not a good basis for making important policy.

Any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?... that the crops and trees grow downward?... that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another.

When you're quiet, others can form opinions that are way off the mark.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there's actually nothing there to learn from.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, 'I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way.' This belief is sometimes true, but not across the board.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

There's certain things that people hold as truth but that are not always necessarily true.

Perception is not always reality.

It's not the things you don't know that trip you up. It's the things you think you know, but you don't. You fail to ask a certain question because you believe you know the answer. Separating your information from your assumptions can be very tricky business.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.