Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'

Believe in order to Understand and Understand in order to Believe

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

What you see is evidence of what you believe.

If you believe you are right, or you believe you are wrong, you're right. Whenever you are certain about it, you will support it. Remember that.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

Belief cannot be reckoned with in terms of science, for science and faith are mutually exclusive.

I believe that people believe what they believe they believe.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Listen to my story and everything will come out true

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

We cannot see what we don't believe.

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.

Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.