The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained. - Daniel Kahneman

declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

The mystery is how a conception that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: Once you have accepted a theory, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has observed, disbelieving is hard work.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.