Derrick Jensen Quotes

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.

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

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.

Some people have a peculiar faculty for denying facts.

No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer.

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.

Too many theorists have a tendency to ignore facts that contradict their convictions.

That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.

When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.

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. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads.

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

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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

A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous rearguard action against the facts.