Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experience. No one can eliminate prejudices—just recognize them.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

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.

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.

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.

People are going to believe what they want to believe.

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

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

If you have a pre-conceived idea of the world, you edit information. When it leads you down a certain road, you don't challenge your own beliefs.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it but that this evidence was starting us in the face all the time.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

Judgment traps you within the limitations of your comparisons. It inhibits freedom.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

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

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

People believe what they want to believe.

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

Some one has said that most of us don't think, we just occasionally rearrange our prejudices.