Quotes & Sayings About Political Bias

The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper. — Jo Brand

Once I appealed to distinguish words "gay" and "homosexual" ( ... ). "Gayship" is a political homosexualism, a sort of left-wing ideology based on a bias against traditional lifestyle ( ... ). Homosexualism is a sexual preference. — Rafal A. Ziemkiewicz

A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias. — Raymond Geuss

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer. — Thomas Szasz

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.
BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.
(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties") — Ellen Willis

That is why I come forward tonight without any political label, without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilization. — John Amery

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself. — Michelle Alexander

Our legal and political culture has created a bias in the law that borders on censorship against reading, displaying, or quoting the Bible. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

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

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so,
not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office forbid it,
but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil. — Stephen Leacock

Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power. — Gloria Steinem

Most men think that in framing their political opinions they are actuated by desire for the public good; but 9 times out of 10 a man's politics can be predicted from the way in which he makes a living. This has led some people to maintain, and many more to believe practically, that in such matters it is impossible to be objective, and that no method is possible except a tug-of-war between classes with opposite bias. — Bertrand Russell

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. — Ludwig Von Mises

...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly. — Lee Doren

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst
those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though ... — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Recognizing that many forms of violence are motivated by a range of intentions and hostilities, the terms racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic and transphobic violence are used here in an effort to more accurately describe the phenomena under discussion: the terms bias or hate crime suggest that such violence is motivated entirely by prejudice (presumably irrational) and not informed by historical patterns of dominance and subordination that produce tangible political, social, and economic benefits for majority groups. Regardless of the terminology used or its targets, there is no question that such violence is abhorrent, structural, and pervasive. Where — Joey L. Mogul

Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown. — Michelle Alexander

[T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity. — George Orwell

It is certainly true that conservative Christians are much more likely to doubt the reality of climate change than mainline Christians or the unaffiliated. But when we control for political affiliation and for the important role of thought leaders in determining our opinions on social issues such as climate change, most of the faith-related bias disappears. — Katharine Hayhoe

The more one is aware of political bias the more one can be independent of it & the more one claims to be impartial the more one is biased. — George Orwell

I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced. — Lesley Stahl

No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. — George Orwell

The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias ... There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes. — William Kristol

This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe? — Lee Doren

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

it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants. — John O'Toole

The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias - in a way, it's designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them. — Eli Pariser