18 Quotes Tagged: gullibility

When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

It's because fear sells. It's because war is sport. And it's also very good business.

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

"Both <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/201036.Barnum" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Barnum">Barnum</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7805.H__L__Mencken" rel="nofollow noopener" title="H. L. Mencken">H. L. Mencken</a> are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking."

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.

youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience — that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces....Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility....

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822]

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.