James Harvey Robinson Quotes

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

People believe what they want to believe.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it…. Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves, for they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing than that every man is contented with his share.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

The Fondness we have for Self, and the Relation which other Persons and Things have to ourselves, furnish us with another long Rank of Prejudices.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Almost every one flatters himself that he and his are exceptionable.

In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

I always look at myself knowing that I will have a certain degree of cognitive distortion.

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.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

It is as easy to deceive one's self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding out.