31 Quotes Tagged: bias

Allow your hearts to be driven by principle, not bias. Love, not hate. Unity, not division. The fire of your dreams, not the rain of your sorrows.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and
already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

Let's invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It's not about being perfect. It's not about where you get yourself in the end. There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.

How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.

Persons who have a painful affection in any part of the body, and are in a great measure sensible of the pain, are disordered in intellect.

Don't believe everything you think.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I shall not be able to find my way across the room, nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Choice of sources can shield extreme bias behind a façade of objectivity.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

As a chief ingredient in the mythology of science, the accumulation of objective facts supposedly controls the history of conceptual change–as logical and self-effacing scientists bow before the dictates of nature and willingly change their views to accommodate the growth of conceptual knowledge. The paradigm for such an idealistic notion remains Huxley’s famous remark about “a beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” But single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away (and properly so, for the majority of deeply anomalous observations turn out to be wrong)...

Anomalous facts get incorporated into existing theories, often with a bit of forced stretching to be sure, but usually with decent fit because most worldviews contain considerable flexibility. (How else could they last so long, or be so recalcitrant to overthrow?)

When you are inquiring into any subject, maintain a due regard to the arguments and objections on both sides of a question; consider, compare, and balance them well, before you determine for one side. It is a frequent, but a very faulty practice, to hunt after arguments only to make good one side of a question, and entirely to neglect and refuse those which favour the others side. If we have not given a due weight to arguments on both sides, we do but willfully misguide our judgment, and abuse our reason by forbidding its search after truth.