147 quotes found
“For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?”
“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which th...”
“We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas ...”
“When we do cross paths with people whose beliefs and attitudes conflict with our own, we are rarely challenged.”
“How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth ...”
“I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are doubl...”
“In a totally dysfunctional society, the profession of a writer would not exist.”
“Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.”
“Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon.”
“I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State...a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the Uni...”
“The wyvern swooped, but it was not to rend and tear but rather to bank and stare with one curious beady eye at the bodies of the minds that had touched hers in a way that no human had dared to do f...”
“The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman t...”
“I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.”
“Yes, one can wager war in this world, ape love, torture ones fellow man, or merely say evil of ones neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.”
“I dont think I believe in any god, Merla said. I think we make our own destiny. I think religion is superstition. Does that shock you?Agata shook her head and smiled. If the Goddess is kind, then s...”
“Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of ...”
“let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance be...”
“The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must strugg...”
“Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place....”
“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
