Samuel Butler Quotes

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

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

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.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

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

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.

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

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

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

It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.

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.

My greatest surprise was that so much of what we think is common sense is just prejudice, and so much of what we think is scientific fact is about as scientific as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.

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

There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

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.