398 Bias Quotes

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

I didn't say that the Jews are inferior. I didn't even maintain they are a race. I merely saw that the mixture of different cultures didn't work.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

They're all weak, all women. They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess, you know. They're like beginners. They lose every single game against a man. There isn't a woman player in the world I can't give knight-odds to and still beat.

They're lying bastards. Jews were always lying bastards throughout their history. They're a filthy, dirty, disgusting, vile, criminal people.

We have observed for thirty centuries that a large nose is a sign on the door of our face that says 'Herein dwells a man who is intelligent, prudent, courteous, affable, noble-minded and generous'. A small nose is a cork on the bottle of the opposite vices.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

The Idols of Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. Thus it happens that human knowledge, as we have it, is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which we at first imbibed.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'

But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.

Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.

A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.

It is a trial within a nation but a trial of victors against the vanquished. Even before the trials started, the victors who are our judges were quite convinced that we were guilty and that we should all pay the price.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.

Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

My views on birth control are somewhat distorted by the fact that I was seventh of nine children.

O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

There is an old saying that all roads lead to Rome. It seems the administration so often clearly believes that no matter what the evidence was at any particular time, essentially everything led to Saddam Hussein.

Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?

People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred.

[Operation] Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasizing reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.

In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.

It is the fortunate who should extol fortune.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

'Democrats cannot conceive of 'hate speech' towards Christians because, in their eyes, Christians always deserve it.'

'Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.'

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.

Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. - We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.

If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.

Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in 'experts'.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

What ardently we wish we soon believe.

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the 'legitimate' votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the 'real' Americans the Democrats must pursue.

To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.

We usually see only the things we are looking for - so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, 'the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery',' and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of 'the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.'

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

In men this blunder still you find,- All think their little set mankind.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen - or better still, talk - that their parents were just as bad.

Everybody wrings their hands about Fox News. You know, 'fair and balanced? Why, that's snide!' Yeah, okay, maybe they're not fair and balanced, but CNN used to have the slogan 'You Can Depend on CNN'. Guess what? I watch it, no you can't. So what's the difference?

Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

Prejudice comes from being in the dark; sunlight disinfects it.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified, and new prejudices to be opposed.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don't seem so bad lately.

I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. (Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.)

'I'm sorry I'm not gay or Jewish, so I don't have a special interest group of journalists that support me.'

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.

It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom.

Whom does any body trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?

An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just. (82)

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason. (272)

The government hates rap. That's why they don't arrest anybody that kills rappers! Only the good ones are dead, man! Only the good ones: Biggie dead, Tupac dead, Vanilla Ice still alive! They don't fill out a police report. They don't even have a chalk line when it's a dead rapper, they just take a piss around the body: 'Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick! Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick!'

I do not like to call myself a Liberal, because there is so much that is wrong with liberalism. I also do not like to call my a Conservative for exactly the same reason. The fact that the theater of conservativism seems to be such a haven for such an abundance of small minded, non-thinking, irrationalists is however making it very difficult for me to not adopt a harder stance.

The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.

Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.

The Jews work more effectively against us than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in. It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pests to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America.

Actors work and slave-and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.