Quotes & Sayings About Gullible

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert ... Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust — Margaret Heffernan

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did.

-- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5 — Christopher R. Browning

Cynicism is extremely contagious, and the most pious among us cannot long endure its potency. The gullible should be on their guard, however, since this endearing quality frequently masquerades as wit. — Mike Corbett

Gossip is a plague that consumes weak, gullible people and blinds them from the truth of reality; it can devour entire city's. I prefer keeping my eyes wide open. — David Spade

You were gullible," he said. And then, "When you were really little, you hated carrots. You wouldn't eat them. But then I told you that if you ate carrots, you'd get X-ray vision. And you believed me. You believed everything I said."
I did. I really did.
I believed him when he said that carrots could give me X-ray vision. I believed him when he told me that he'd never cared about me. And then, later that night, when he tried to take it back, I guess I believed him again. Now I didn't know what to believe. I just knew I didn't believe in him anymore. — Jenny Han

If you are inherently a good guy, which I think I am, you instinctively want to help people even before you know what their problem may be. Which, as I examine that notion, makes good guys sound gullible. Con artists look for good guys because of that built-in gullibility. If they're con artists that come in a sexually alluring package, a good guy can become a brainless idiot. Allow me to introduce myself. — Dan Skinner

Women were created gullible. It they weren't no babies would be born. — Dakota Dawn

Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we'll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. — Joe Hill

I'm gullible. I think people mean what they say. — Colin Trevorrow

If you are a denier, get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible. Remember, it has been historically and scientifically proven, in a court of law no less, that more than 1.2 million Jews, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were killed at Auschwitz alone. Beyond that, Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names has collected 4.5 million Jewish victims' names (and counting) from various archival sources. How much more evidence could you possibly want? — James Morcan

There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them. — Michael Moore

Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history. — Ishmael Reed

You'd be surprised what people will accept once you insist two or three times running that they have seen what you tell them they have seen. — Andrew Levkoff

if we seek to follow Jesus, we must be passers-by of many things around us: we should keep alert, we should discern where we are, we ought at times to avoid and not touch; we shouldn't condemn, but neither should we be duped or gullible or willing to buy the latest cultural dope on offer; we should just move along, behaving circumspectly and speaking up when necessary - boldly, charitably, humbly - and hope that our dissimilarity from many societal norms will testify to others that there exists a better, more peaceable, more loving way to live. — Addison Hodges Hart

Evolution is unobservable. It's based on blind faith in a few dry bones and on unreliable dating systems in which the gullible trust. Kids should be allowed to make up their own minds about this issue, and not be censored to 'one side is all we will let you hear.' — Ray Comfort

Often, men who would never think of lying in the workplace lie constantly in intimate relationships. This seems to be especially the case for heterosexual men who see women as gullible. — Bell Hooks

But you helped me and Arik. Why would you do that if you really feel that way? (Geary)
What can I say? It's so much more enjoyable to snatch victory from the hands of the gullible. You guys make the most delightful sound of agony when you're betrayed. (Solin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Normally I would not recommend a book that tells you how to make money in the stock market. Most of these books are aimed at gullible folk, and they usually make much more money for their authors than they do for the investing public. — Gavyn Davies

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools! — Lee Kuan Yew

W: Nobody's so gullible as scientists. All the phony mediums say so. Can't quite see why.

J: Oh, yes, it would be so. They think they know, you see. That's always dangerous.

~Wharton; Jessop — Agatha Christie

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious. — Colin Wilson

People who work out are so gullible. They think they'll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It's a shame most of them aren't bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they're eighty and too old to do anything productive with it is roughly equal to all the time wasted in the gym when they're young and capable of having fun. — Toni Jordan

What's the return on investment of college? What's the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human. — William Deresiewicz

As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are ... "
Admonitions for the Priesthood of God", Ensign, Jan 1973 — Harold B. Lee

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror. — Amartya Sen

No way that was a act. She really is that gullible. She really is dumb as a sack of moondust."
"Yet very sweet."
Eve rolled her eyes toward him. "I think you have to have a penis to get that impression. — J.D. Robb

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels. — Charles Fort

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it. — Neil Postman

Unfortunately, as much as I am gullible, I also hate lying. I tend to tell the truth a lot ... lying just isn't worth it. But I think I'm guilty of telling people that I'm 5 minutes away when really I'm about 45 or an hour away. — Monica Raymund

What makes you think you can survive as a saint in this world, unless you make it your business to exploit the gullible and greedy? — Anand Neelakantan

Cordone, delighted with himself for swindling the gullible Indians out of a fortune in pearls, stood at the railing of his ship smiling down at the pursuers. He was about to order his soldiers to fire upon the Indians when he was struck in the chest by an arrow. He dropped to the deck. — W.C. Jameson

it is better to be gullible than suspicious. — Julian Fellowes

Don't waste my time- I'm not stupid, and I'm not gullible. — Laura Schlessinger

Massage therapists, and others in the holistic arts ... seem to be a particularly gullible bunch. And there are a lot of people who have seized upon that, and marketed their products, their classes, their modalities, and their wild claims to us ... and many of us have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker ... and unfortunately, gone on to convince our clients to buy into it, as well ... Our profession has turned into the snake oil medicine show. — Laura Allen

There, in the horseshoe drive, Kelly, gullible and mortal Kelly, awaits an explanation from a bedraggled immortal. The Minotaur accepts this temporary blessing for all it is worth. There are few things that he knows, these among them: that is is inevitable, even necessary, for a creature half man and half bull to walk the face of the earth; that in the numbing span of eternity even the most monstrous among us needs love; that the minutiae of life sometimes defer to folly; that even in the most tedious unending life there comes, occasionally, hope. One simply has to wait and be ready. — Steven Sherrill

With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort. — Richard Dawkins

I'm so gullible. I'm so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible. — Lana Turner

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. — Richard Dawkins

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it's something fantastic. They're willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. — Cindy Sherman

Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specialises in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles. It has reinvented itself so often, and with such breath-taking hypocrisy, in the interests of retaining its hold on the gullible, that a medieval monk who woke today, like Woody Allen in Sleeper, would not be able to recognise the faith that bears the same name as his own. — A.C. Grayling

It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them. — Andrea Dworkin

Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity — Frank Wynne

The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust ... — Carl R. Rogers

Don't be gullible, use life before it uses you. Understand there are no free lunches, and for every action you take, there's a reaction. — Sylvester Stallone

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible. — Thomas Sowell

A lot of people pretend to be. They wear robes and put on airs to take advantage of the ignorant and gullible. But — Patrick Rothfuss

An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman. — Gunter Grass

Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible - these are the qualities of the ideal consumer. Can we imagine a way of education that would turn passive consumers into active and informed critics, capable of using their own minds in their own defense? — Wendell Berry

When my sons told me about what they'd found, I went to the priests of Belar and had them examine the auguries. This is the year to go. The ice up there won't be as thick again for years and years. Then they cast my own auguries, and from what they say, this could be the most fortunate year in my whole life."
"Do you actually believe that superstitious nonsense?" I demanded. "Are you so gullible that you think that somebody can foretell the future by fondling a pile of sheep guts?"
He looked a little injured. "This was important, Belgarath. I certainly wouldn't trust sheep's entrails for something like this."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"We used a horse instead. Horse guts never lie. — David Eddings

An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, — Daniel Kahneman

The truth is that in all probability he (Jesus) never existed, but was created by the Jewish authors of the New Testament as a fantasy figure for the purpose of persuading gullible Gentiles to accept the revolutionary ideas that would be their undoing. — Christine M. Johns

They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense? — Dexter Palmer

The whole entire existence of the pharmaceutical industry is based on presentation of false science, and advertising this false science and drumming it into the minds of gullible people who have no curiosity to find out why that is so. — Fereydoon Batmanghelidj

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The menace of human trafficking continues to endure only because, there are some heartless men who are taking advantage of the lives and bodies the gullible victims get trapped into. — Sunday Adelaja

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap. — Walter Kirn

The human population is 90% gullible, violence-prone dipshits. — Scott Adams

The most difficult lesson is not being bitter - that balancing you need to do so you don't become bitter, even as you cease being gullible. — Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Swindlers are notoriously gullible. — Mason Cooley

I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say. — James Hansen

Nothing wrong with gullible. How you be happy if not gullible? — Cynthia Kadohata

In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth. — Warren Buffett

Well, first of all, I'm an incredibly gullible person - I'm so bad that when I said that to someone, my friend said, 'You know, 'gullible' isn't even in the dictionary.' And I said, 'Really?' As I was saying 'Really?' I will acknowledge that I then realized what was happening, but that's how bad I am. — Carla Gugino

What I love about 'Big Hero 6', with Baymax himself - this sentient creature who's actually a learning robot - with each experience, this naive and gullible creature becomes more aware of issues. — Roy Conli

Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible. — Janet E. Morris

Putin had told Yeltsin that he did not like election campaigns, and now he dismissed campaign promises as unachievable lies told by politicians and denigrated television advertisements as unseemly manipulation of gullible consumers. — Steven Lee Myers

The only thing that can be expected from the next US president is more war, more murder, and more oppression of the gullible American people. People as uninformed and as gullible as Americans have no future. Americans are a dead people that history is about to run over. — Paul Craig Roberts

If others think I am nuts, naive, gullible, and not living in the real world, that's all right, too... I'll gladly stay in what some have called my fictitious world, my happy and peaceful world, a world full of signs of hope. — Ward Foley

He had never before thought of himself as gullible. He wondered where he had gone wrong. It occurred to him that he had let himself be overawed - by bishop Henry and his silk robes, by the magnificence of Winchester and its cathedral, by the piles of silver in the mint and the heaps of meat in the butchers' shops, and by the thought of seeing the king. He had forgotten that God saw through the silk robes to the sinful heart, that the only wealth worth having was treasure in heaven, and that the even the king had to kneel down in church. Feeling that everyone else was so much powerful and sophisticated than he was, he had lost sight of his true values, suspended his critical faculties, and places his trust in his superiors. — Ken Follett

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour? — Keith Henson

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar. — Roger Zelazny

The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible. — Richard Dawkins

The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases: (a) the lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future; (b) the hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future; (c) the vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations; (d) the development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible. — Irving Fisher

You told me this wasn't a formal date when you invited me to come. Why should I care if you have a girlfriend?"
"Absolutely," he said, giving me a fake-serious look. "Yeah, you and I are just friends ... out for a friendly walk. Nothing more, nothing less."
"Exactly!" I agreed, my heart giving a painful twist.
He broke into a large grin and, leaning over, kissed me on the cheek. "Kate," he whispered, "you are way too gullible. — Amy Plum

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased - it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe's heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton. — Hilary Mantel

Fame is proof that the people are gullible. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's a mistake to lie to a librarian, you know. Some people assume we're shy and gullible, but we know how to dig up the dirt. — Virginia Lowell

Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute - often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is. — Charley Reese

What we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put ourselves. — Bill McKibben

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. — Robert E. Sherwood

Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence. — Mason Cooley

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.
Have a nice day. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars. — Paul Craig Roberts

It doesn't work the same way everywhere. The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests. People in the former Soviet bloc countries are less trusting, perhaps because of their previous experiences with their countries' secret services. — Kevin Mitnick

The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests. — Kevin Mitnick

A gullible dreamer is better than an expert doubter. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Fame is proof that people are gullible. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. — Caitlin Moran

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic. — Jesse L. Martin

Hell? Hell is a fairy tale for the gullible, for what punishment could be worse than that we inflict upon ourselves? We burn so badly in this life that there can be nothing left. — Erika Johansen

I am officially turning him over to you. He's your problem now. You'll have to watch out for him and that won't be easy. He's naive, gullible, immature, horribly unsophisticated, ignorant about anything worth knowing, and idealistic to a fault." He paused to make a show of thinking harder. "He's also indecisive, pathetically honest, a horrible liar, and too virtuous for words. He gets up twice each night to relieve himself, wads his clothes rather than folds them, chews with his mouth open, and talks with his mouth full. He has a nasty habit of cracking his knuckles every morning at breakfast, and, of course, he snores. To remedy that, just put a rock under his blanket. — Michael J. Sullivan

Be grateful to the gullible heart! — Marty Rubin

[H]e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel. — Iain M. Banks

The moment workers can afford too little they rebel. The last time this was a real danger was 1950. Communists took advantage of supply problems and stirred up gullible people against their very own country. — Elfriede Jelinek

We live in such a gullible world. Anything that's written, anything that's posted, anything picture that is interpreted one way is taken as truth. — Keri Hilson

So-called 'higher education' is a veritable magnet for second-raters and actively destructive parasites bent on promoting unsound ideas to the inexperienced and gullible. The concentrate in areas like social studies, literature, and art - where opinion reigns supreme. And I find their opinions almost universally appalling. — Doug Casey

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print. — E.B. White

The Palestinians were deliberately forced into refugee camps by their fellow Muslims and not permitted to integrate in any way into the society of their unwilling hosts. Their own people didn't even try to help them; instead they prevailed upon the United Nations and gullible Western charities to supply the refugees' needs. They have been kept in these camps for more than sixty years - like an unhealed wound by their own people - just to be used as political pawns by Muslim negotiators to charge their plight as "Israeli aggression. — Hal Lindsey