People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

A half-truth is more dangerous than a lie.

To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute.

…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives…

How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people.

It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.