No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time
Of course, my own political beliefs inform the ideas I come up with.
We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced-and sometimes strongly-by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.
I start looking for adjectives in news reporting, and if there are too many of them, if they're all sort of repeatedly designed to influence my thinking in a certain way, I start getting concerned. I'm leery of people trying to paint a picture in a certain way.
I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great, and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.
My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures.
My daughter's met Hillary Clinton, so she's got a strong bias. But she, of course, parrots me and goes, 'Oh, Donald Trump, I don't like him!' I'm like, 'That's good!'
All of us, more than we recognize, are products of the thinking around us. And much of this thinking is little, not big.
Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men's heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.
The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.
Our prejudices - we all have them - are part of our personality structure. The problem is that our prejudices may lie lurking at the bottom of the subterranean mind where the slowly ooze up and color our thinking without our knowing it.
