Unwarranted Certainty Quotes

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.

The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.

We think we know what's right. With excessive pride comes blindness.

It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!

The less you know, the more you believe.

Beware of anyone who says they know. Trust me, they don't, or they wouldn't have to say they did.

It's what a fellow thinks he knows that hurts him.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for - people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works.

Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.

The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Ignorance and confidence is a lethal cocktail.

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Over-confidence is as evil as undue anxiety.