Errol Morris 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.

…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.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

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.

One of the mistakes we'll make because we're human beings is to believe that your vision is a fact. That's the natural optimism of human beings.

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

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

From time to time, everyone distorts. We all tend to believe what supports our side of the question and doubt what weakens it. When we are under stress, we tend to believe what we need to believe.

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.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

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

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

Those who think their intellect will keep them from deception are already deceived.