Quotes & Sayings About Biased

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it. — Umberto Eco

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices. — Whitney Balliett

I wish there were strict laws to stop people from corrupting other people's mind with their negativity thus influencing them to form biased opinion of someone, some situation or overall way of living. — Arti Honrao

I may be biased, but I think jackals are cute and cuddly, even if they were known for digging up graves in Ancient Egypt. — Rick Riordan

Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications. — Ethan Zuckerman

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 Noe

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. — Anthony Burgess

He was staring down another loss, and, though he had to be logical, though he knew her to be logical, he saw the stricken look of betrayal on her face, and all of those arguments threatened to fly away from him. What was history anyway but the lies of the winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? It was an imperfect record written by a biased hand, diluted to garner the most agreement from competing parties. He was tempted to see her point, to imagine that she could realign the past and present and future into something beautiful. God, if anyone was capable of it, it would be her. — Alexandra Bracken

Intelligence resides between us as much as it resides in us. And it resides within the subconscious much more than it does the conscious. We're just conscious-biased: our conscious mind wants us to think it's the be all and end all. — James Rozoff

I learned a lot from this book, because I wrote it myself. My rating may be somewhat biased as a result. — Peter V. Brett

If you follow Donald Trump's logic, say that he couldn't decide any civil rights cases because he would be biased.I mean, we do want a diverse and inclusive judiciary - one that looks like the people that they serve. And we do recognize the value of having diverse backgrounds represented. — Deborah Rhode

The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume. In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys let's grow a pair. — Ann Coulter

That dot is special. That dot is where LIFE lives. And I get it, it's biased of a living organism (like me) to think that life is important and special, but I don't care!
Because stars don't care, galaxies don't care, but people do.
Undoubtedly we're something special because, as far as we can tell, we are unique. — Charlie McDonnell

The compassion we feel normally is biased and mixed with attachment. Genuine compassion flows towards all living beings, particularly your enemies. If I try to develop compassion towards my enemy, it may not benefit him directly, he may not even be aware of it. But it will immediately benefit me by calming my mind. On the other hand, if I dwell on how awful everything is, I immediately lose my peace of mind. — Dalai Lama

[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement. — Marie-Louise Sjoestedt

Julie crossed her arms. "I'm serious. Flat Finn can't possibly go to school with her, right?"
"He already went to Brandeis so, no, he doesn't need to repeat seventh grade. Although they did make him take a bunch of tests in order to qualify out. He barely passed the oral exams, though, because the instructors found him withholding and tight-lipped. It's a terribly biased system, but at least he passed and won't have to suffer through the school's annual reenactment of the first Thanksgiving. He has a pilgrim phobia."
"Funny. Really, what's the deal with Flat Finn?"
"After an unfortunate incident involving Wile E. Coyote and an anvil, Three Dimensional Finn had to change his name. — Jessica Park

It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-biased media and the homosexuals who want to destroy all Christians. — Pat Robertson

Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. [...] We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions [...] We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries! — McLuhan Marshal

Men are often biased in their judgment on account of their sympathy and their interests. — George William Norris

Weakness The Lovers Upright Romance, Love, Honor, Optimism, a Harmonious Partnership Reverse Separation, Untrustworthy, Fickleness, Unreliability The Chariot Upright Perseverance, Seeking Justice, Strong in the face of Adversity Reverse Defeat, Failure, Unproductive Justice Upright Righteousness, Equality, Integrity, Honor, Fairness Reverse Unfairness, Falsely Accused, Mistreatment, Biased The Hermit Upright Withdrawal, Independent, Inner Strength, Carefulness, Observant Reverse Impulsiveness, Immaturity, Recklessness, Stupidity Wheel of Fortune Upright Unexpected Surprises, Progress, Fate, Fortune — Kathleen Rao

Last time I checked, Congress was created to uphold the values of the Constitution, not the Bible and its biased teachings. 'All men (including women) are created equal' and are afforded unalienable rights. Way to go, Mr. President! Stand up for what you believe and for the people of this country. — Barack Obama

Facts do not lie within biased opinions. — Dawn Stewart Field

Human beings tend to be unable to estimate how biased they are. — Jean-Francois Manzoni

Accountable Authentic Collaborative Courageous Passionate Lifelong learner Welcomes feedback Biased toward action Solution oriented Change agent — Susan Scott

And all we feared inside the night / shows true in morning's biased light. — Garth Von Buchholz

Scientists are human - they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process. — Cyril Ponnamperuma

Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge. — John Palfrey

Are public school textbooks biased? Are they censored? The answer to both is yes. And the nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks. — Paul Vitz

Nevertheless, should you have any doubts that we are stating sound doctrines, look up the references and see exactly what the Bible says and believe it in preference to any man. You cannot go wrong with this kind of advice. But in doing this, be sure you adhere to what is written, and that you do not let preconceived ideas cause you to be biased on any point. Do not try to make the Bible conform to your ideas. Always reconcile your ideas to the Bible. Let the plain language of the references given be read and understood in the same literal way that we would understand similar statements in any other book — Finis Jennings Dake

I was on Khodorkovsky's payroll myself for ten years. I'm biased because I respect him. — Vladislav Surkov

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. — Haruki Murakami

The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and [care to try to] avoid being wrong, and biased, and prejudiced, and clueless; those are the people we need, and need to be. — Matt Dillahunty

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

The best way to expose our ignorance is to hold on to biased ideas and opinions, because we fear giving the upper hand to the other side. — Charles F. Glassman

I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. — John Green

Never refuse an assignment except when there is a conflict of interest, a potential of danger to you or your family, or you hold a strongly biased attitude about the subject under focus. — Jessica Savitch

The brain of the modern human is no longer capable of understanding reality directly. It used to be that a person lived, looked toward the horizon, howled at the moon, and formed his conceptions, however biased, based on his own experiences and observations. There used to be this thing called independent learning. Not anymore. They crystallize our brains like ice from water. Imagine how slowly, starting in childhood, your brain is crystallized for you, forming your conception of reality. We could even determine a unit of currency for all humanity, 'the value of one concept.' Everyone would have their own change purse, so to speak, and the coins in it, though of various values, quantities, styles, and metals, would all be from a single mint. — Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

So long as the people with the power - to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket - look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia or any other -sim they've learned form stories, videos, media and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone. — Kameron Hurley

For too long, the system has been biased in favor of oil and gas developers: sweetheart lease deals, generous subsidies and a regulatory process so slanted in favor of Big Oil that often permit reviews are simply waived. — Chellie Pingree

It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be so biased and backward, so utterly frustrating,misguided,misinformed and dangerous that I can't stand to listen to them. — Cecelia Ahern

Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man. — Arthur Hays Sulzberger

I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life. — Ellen Stofan

I can't promise my child a life without bias - we're all biased - but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives. — K.K. Raghava

Immigration law's already settled. That's why we have people known as illegal immigrants, because the law is very clear. They're not being called illegal immigrants because people are biased and prejudiced. — Rush Limbaugh

Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought. — Albert Ellis

If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

He truly fraudulent claims must be discarded. But novel methods of therapy should not be rejected because they are novel, or because they run counter to some generally accepted belief ("which may just be biased"), or because we do not understand the mechanism of the proposed treatment, or because it has come from an unconventional source. — Linus Pauling

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know. — Tansy Rayner Roberts

When people look at a photograph, they believe it ... My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view. — Zoe Leonard

a grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material. — Alfie Kohn

The pen is mightier than the sword" was written by a pen making it biased. — Anonymous

If the wolf is to survive, the wolf haters must be outnumbered. They must be outshouted, out financed, and out voted. Their narrow and biased attitude must be outweighed by an attitude based on an understanding of natural processes. — L. David Mech

What?" Ron bellowed furiously. "Four? You lousy, biased scumbag, you gave Krum ten!" But Harry didn't care, he wouldn't have cared if Karkaroff had given him zero; Ron's indignation on his behalf was worth about a hundred points to him. He didn't tell Ron this, of course, but his heart felt lighter than air as he turned to leave the enclosure. And it wasn't just Ron . . . those weren't only Gryffindors cheering in the crowd. When it had come to it, when they had seen what he was facing, most of the school had been on his side as well as Cedric's. . . . He didn't care about the Slytherins, he could stand whatever they threw at him now. "You're tied in first place, Harry! You and Krum!" said Charlie Weasley, hurrying to meet them as they set off back toward the school. — J.K. Rowling

Hundreds of studies confirm that human forecasts are flawed and biased. Human decision making is not so great either. Again to take just one example, consider what is called the "status quo bias," a fancy name for inertia. For a host of reasons, which we shall explore, people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option. — Richard H. Thaler

Today's Democrat Party believes that distinct American culture is corrupt, biased, racist, sexist, prejudicial, homophobic. There is nothing about it they want to preserve. — Rush Limbaugh

We were telling, and frankly the media didn't take it seriously, during the time when we tried to point out that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was biased. She scheduled debates at times that didn't draw huge audiences, I believe, and many believe, because she didn't want Bernie to have a larger exposure to the voters. — Jonathan Tasini

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. — Alice Dreger

But when to sin our biased nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires. — John Dryden

I may be biased, but I think the cover art is stunning. — Patricia Leavy

What we saw was that the Ferguson Police Department in conjunction with the municipality saw traffic stops, arrests, tickets as a revenue generator, as opposed to serving the community, and that it systematically was biased against African-Americans in that city who were stopped, harassed, mistreated, abused, called names, fined. — Barack Obama

We humans can't see straight. We are always biased. We always protect our own interests. — Harlan Coben

The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story. — Randall Kennedy

I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child. — Margaret Mead

Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant. — Carl Schmitt

Be able to recognize when you're reading or hearing material biased to your own side. — Marilyn Vos Savant

-The timekiller?!
-Who is the killer?
-The time?
-Or the killer?
The answer is like a king in a pathless position on the chessboard. The answer is an eternel looser. It's fate is sealed up in the testament of Hades. The killer is mortal and he can't testify forever, but the time is biased, one-sided, partial, because it is timeless and a constant winner.
So, the circle is closed.
The game is over-checkmate! — Hristo Krstevski

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society - national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera - that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission. — James Alexander Thom

Anne Boleyn isn't a sympathetic character, but I like that she isn't a people pleaser. She's ambitious and manipulative, but she's honest. I'm biased, but I don't think a woman who has said 'no' to the King of England for six years would jump into bed with four of his best friends. She was a slick political mind. — Lydia Leonard

Loser"
"Father directed choir. When it paused on a Sunday,
he liked to loiter out morning with the girls;
then back to our cottage, dinner cold on the table,
Mother locked in bed devouring tabloid.
You should see him, white fringe about his ears,
bald head more biased than a billiard ball
he never left a party. Mother left by herself
I threw myself from her car and broke my leg ...
Years later, he said, 'How jolly of you to have jumped.'
He forgot me, mother replaced his name, I miss him.
When I am unhappy, I try to squeeze the hour
an hour or half-hour smaller than it is;
orphaned, I wake at midnight and pray for day
the lovely ladies get me through the day — Robert Lowell

Discussions about the ethics of suicide are immediately biased by the verb that customarily attaches to it in English. One "commits" suicide. Because this presupposes the wrongfulness of the suicide, I avoid that verb, opting instead for "carry out" suicide. This is evaluatively neutral, avoiding both the usual bias against suicide and the unusual bias in favor of it that the verb "achieve" would effect. "Carry out" is preferable to "practice", which implies something ongoing. Finally, "carry out" also implies a suicide that is completed rather than merely attempted. — David Benatar

Sure, he had left some parts out - how they had offered to pay the Rinskys more than the house was worth, for example - but this wasn't about being balanced. Attorneys take sides. The other side, if and when they responded, would give their spin. You were supposed to be biased. That was how the system worked. — Harlan Coben

Personally, I think we should remove the word "shooting" from the vernacular. It's an ugly, biased word that somehow creates the assumption that a gun was involved. Let's go with 'Interpersonal Ballistic Event' (IBE). — Quentin R. Bufogle

I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children. — Richard Dawkins

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon. — Douglas Rushkoff

Serge nodded. 'And I respect your opinion because you smoke marijuana. You're chemically biased against violence and job applications. — Tim Dorsey

It's called an inner voice for a reason. It's the gnawing feeling inside your stomach telling you yes or no. It's the one voice in your life that isn't tampered by other's biased opinions, scars, feelings or thoughts. Go with it, you know yourself better than anyone ever does. — Hope Alcocer

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well
they certainly are
but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed
there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases. — David Byrne

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren't controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn't believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it's owned by a small group of people, we realize it's biased, etc. — Marianne Williamson

The belief that established science and scholarship
which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making
are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! — Adrienne Rich

All people express a fondness for truth and sincerity, yet many people prefer to live with their illusions and delusions. A person's sincere desire to believe only what is true oftentimes does not trump their ingrained resistance to truths that fail to coincide with their deeply held desires. People reject truth because it undercuts what they wish was true and despise or discredit anyone whom offers a different version of truth than they are prepared to accept. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked — Thomas Gilovich

He doesn't have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He's a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part. — Marc Maron

Not a good book. It attempts to take a complex subject and make it assessable to the layman with cartoons, and in this effort it fails. Moreover, the authors often take biased stances, and while I agree with them for the most part it nonetheless detracts from any scholarly offerings in which they wish to partake. — Richard Appignanesi

Women face enough pressures and challenges in a workplace that is still depressingly biased against a female's success. Add to that, the fact that the very thing many women I know find most rewarding (having kids) is now frowned upon. — Mika Brzezinski

Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again. — DaShanne Stokes

We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in the society who come out on the bottom. — Leonard Mlodinow

The film industry has been extremely welcoming to me. It's an industry which is biased to what they think is talent. If they think you can bring value to cinema, they'll support you. — Imtiaz Ali

I get ratings but I don't do interviews for those people anymore. I don't watch CNN anymore. I don't do interviews with CNN anymore because its not worth it. It's very biased against me. — Donald Trump

Polls are biased left; GOP wins on the issues. — Newt Gingrich

Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches. — Peter Thiel

So long as there is an Israeli occupation in Palestine and so long as U.S. policy is biased, the so-called terrorism that the United States fears will escalate because the mistakes of U.S. foreign policy are pouring oil on fire. — Khaled Mashal

First, no other animals have the same mirroring effect as horses, meaning they will mirror humans' emotions. Second, they are not judgmental or biased. And third, they live within a social structure, heir herds, much the same as we do. — Valerie Ormond

(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists. — Bertrand Russell

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated. — Franjo Tudjman

The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased. — Sonja Lyubomirsky

The whole Universe is on your side. Life is forever biased on the side of healing, on the side of overcoming, on the side of success. When you get yourself centered in the Universal flow you become synchronized with this divine bias for good. — Eric Butterworth

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information. — Thomas Gilovich

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere. — George Monbiot

Truth's nakedness is not concerned with whom it strikes - painfully, or with pleasure; responding appropriately to its ingenuous temperament, however, rewards perceptions of unbiased transparency. — T.F. Hodge