Confirmatory Quotes & Sayings

Find out what your passions are and gauge your limit. Because success requires hard work and perseverance and sadly, not everyone has the two. — Nik Halik

The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe. — Valerie Tarico

There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is ... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love. — Laura Kasischke

If I hear the word 'retire,' it makes me want to throw up. And then do what? Sit around all day watching television? — Joan Collins

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. — Michael Shermer

darted a look out the window and then back to him. He kept that same faint smile but he watched the road. Houses passed us on either side in a blur of colors overwhelmed by the white of the snow. We shot through an intersection and the traffic light made me stare. I turned back to him. "What's your name?" He looked over at me for a flicker before turning back to the road. "Reed." I nodded. It was a nice — Robert J. Crane

You don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious. — Marcel Ophuls

I'm really, really lucky. I was given my dad's good genes. — Josh Brolin

That might be good news for rationalists - maybe we can think carefully whenever we believe it matters? Not quite. Tetlock found two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an "evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view." Confirmatory thought is "a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view."13 Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. — Jonathan Haidt

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing. — Baron De Montesquieu

Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything. — Art Spiegelman

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.* — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But we don't correct for the difference in science, medicine, and mathematics, for the same reasons we didn't pay attention to iatrogenics. We are suckers for the sophisticated. In institutional research, one can selectively report facts that confirm one's story, without revealing facts that disprove it or don't apply to it - so the public perception of science is biased into believing in the necessity of the highly conceptualized, crisp, and purified Harvardized methods. And statistical research tends to be marred with this one-sidedness. Another reason one should trust the disconfirmatory more than the confirmatory. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion? 3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST — Jonathan Haidt

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories. — Cecil Rhodes

For many, hectic activity provides a kind of perpetual adrenalin rush. Often those consumed by busyness feel as though this pattern of life and work legitimizes them. They feel important; they feel needed; they feel alive. However, they have a false sense of life and importance, and eventually it leaves them feeling hollow.
It — Gordon T. Smith

Give the gift of understanding to your child. When they feel understood, they feel loved! — Aditi Chopra