Mason Cooley Quotes

Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does.

If people believe something is true, then it is even if it isn't.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

People never think of themselves as choosing to be politically correct. They simply think in the way that they do.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

What a people believes, even if untrue, has the same influence over their lives as if it were true.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.