Naive Beliefs Quotes

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.

The Wizard's First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation almost anyone will believe almost anything.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

Since the dawn of civilization, markets have been ubiquitous. Many of us have benefited from their focus and efficiency. Yet two widely held beliefs - that markets are best left unregulated and that markets are inherently benign - are naive and outdated.

I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.

There aren't really any actual misconceptions, just dumb people versus good, honest people.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive.

When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.

The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.

Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.