Bias Quotes

Human beings tend to be unable to estimate how biased they are.

~ Jean-François Manzoni

DONNA: She said she knew it in her heart. Do you know how many times I've been wrong about things I knew in my heart?

~ Aaron Sorkin

Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.

~ Dashanne Stokes

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

~ Dashanne Stokes

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.

~ Ken Ham

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

~ Philip Zaleski

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.

~ H.w. Brands

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

~ Harold Holzer

Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Behavior makes sense from the actor's perception or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be conforming, mistaken, nasty, and so on.

~ Ellen J. Langer

The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.

~ Robert J. Allison

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.

~ Harold Bloom

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

~ Harold Holzer

Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Frank Herbert

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

~ George F. Will

He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy's point of view.

~ H.w. Brands

Perhaps wherever you go first is what you judge everything else by.

~ Patrick Hennessey

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

~ George F. Will

Historical revisionists find what they set out to find.

~ Gregg Frazer

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

~ Rémy De Gourmont

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.

~ Rémy De Gourmont

The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.

~ Carson Mccullers

When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.

~ Criss Jami

It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Someone told me recently that a commentator or some sort had said, The United States is in spiritual free-fall. When people make such remarks, such appalling judgements, they never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an us and a them. Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the us who presume to judge them. This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It’s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.Be not too quick to blame those who misunderstand your perfectly clear sentences, spoken or written. Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, had made both sides see themselves as they are.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The world is a place of constant change. If we are open and ready to consider everything while remaining unbiased, we will be ready to accept these changes and utilize them to improve our lives.

~ Daniel Willey

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Facts and values are entangled in science. It's not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility and replicability. These are value commitments.

~ Alva Noë

He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

~ Robert Galbraith

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.

~ Peter Singer

Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.

~ Paul Brunton

It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverers.

~ John Reader

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.

~ Dashanne Stokes

A mentoring nurse to new doctors: Check your own pulse first.

~ Code Black