Margaret MacMillan Quotes

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

A man sees what he wants to see, And disregards the rest.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

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

As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

It's so funny because no matter what you say, fans only read and hear what they want.

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity.

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

I only use statistics to reinforce what I already think, or if it's something unusual.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

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

When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.

It is said that ridicule is the test of truth: it is never applied, but when we wish to deceive ourselves.

The reason facts don’t change most people’s opinions is because most people don’t use facts to form their opinions. They use their opinions to form their “facts.”