Craig Mazin Quotes

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.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

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.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

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.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

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.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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

People readily believe what they want to believe.

The point is that 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. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

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.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

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

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

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

We believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we'd rather pretend doesn't exist.

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.