Jess Phillips Quotes

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

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.

Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.

Basically, whenever someone says they're wrong, conservatives too often fall back on claims that those who disagree with them are biased and thus worthy of being ignored, a convenient position that allows them to avoid debating uncomfortable criticisms.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.

If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.

Most men … can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives

How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces...they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals-anything or anyone-but never themselves.

The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

When people get their mind made up about something, then it's: 'Don't bother me with facts.' They've got their minds made up and dismiss you out of hand. Some people don't even give you a fair hearing.

I don't like to be proved wrong.

People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.

It's a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

Continuing to believe the same thing, even in the face of new evidence to the contrary, is the definition of insanity - except in politics where it's called leadership.

Whenever I find myself arguing for something with great passion, I can be certain I'm not convinced.

The point is, folks, for people on the left - and I don't care what kind of clothes they wear, or where they live, people on the left, America is guilty. And there is not a set of facts in the world that's gonna change it. There's not a set of facts in the world that's gonna change anybody's mind.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that when the truth comes and knocks on our door, we won't want to let it in.

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.

The left have not the ability to get into reality in any way, shape, manner, or form.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.