Binary Thinking Quotes

[The devil] al­ways sends er­rors into the world in pairs—pairs of op­posites. And he al­ways en­cour­ages us to spend a lot of time think­ing about which is the worse.... He re­lies on your ex­tra dis­like of the one er­ror to draw you grad­u­ally into the op­po­site one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through be­tween both er­rors. We have no other con­cern than that with ei­ther of them.

Being against evil doesn't make you good.

There are two sides to every question, exactly opposite to each other.

Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

I am black or white, I'll never be grey in my life.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

When you're not winning, you're losing.

You're nothing to me until you're everything.

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.

Anything that has only two choices is wrong.

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good," there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument-though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.

Conservatives are either stupid or brilliant. Pick a narrative, leftist MSM. You can't have it both ways.

It is either easy or impossible.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

A woman simply is, but a man must become.

Since we do operate in a binary world, if there's something that cannot be this or that, it drives us crazy.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

I can't wear a little makeup. I have to wear a lot of makeup or no makeup.

I think that, for whatever reason, we've gotten to a place where, particularly in Hollywood, things have to be very pat. Like 'I'm a good guy. I'm a bad guy.'

Anybody who is against that obviously must be a communist.

I'm not the apocalypse nor the promised land.

When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.