Selective Interpretation Quotes

There is no possible reply to these heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose assertions, except to note that they would justify any policy on any subject anywhere, regardless of its empirically observed consequences. In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later—and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'

Because most Christians want it both ways. They want to be able to proudly declare they are believers in the Bible and yet simply ignore those parts they find too difficult or too inconvenient to believe.

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

Faith comes by hearing all the Word, not just preferred sections.

We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines.

I have to say that it's a weird feeling to have to respond to a Christian leader of an anti-Muslims organisation - it would be like having to respond to a Muslim leader of an anti-Jewish organisation about Judaism so the whole thing is kind of weird. Let me just say it's kind of convenient to simply pick and choose whatever violent bits and pieces one finds in the Koran and ignore the equally important versus that talk about compassion and peace.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture.

If you ignore somebody's record and only focus on something that happened 25 years ago when all they were doing even then was trying to stand up for a minority group that felt excluded and discriminated against, then I don't - I think that is a distortion of a person's record. I mean, a person's record is full, not just the parts that you want to use against them.

I only use statistics to reinforce what I already think, or if it's something unusual.

They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.

When a poll is really, really out of whack with what I want to happen, I do have a tendency to disregard it.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

We pick out a text here and there to make it serve our turn; whereas , if we take it all together, and considered what went before and what followed after, we should find it meant no such thing.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.