Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

As I watched him on the stage, my hands were clinched in fists of rage. No angel born in hell, could break that Satan's spell.

I feel blessed. To live an artistic life, it's a blessing.

In every home in America, in the world, there was cruelty, anger and hatred - things I didn't feel.

I'm a lioness. I have four cubs. I'm a mom. I want to take care of my kids and protect them.

To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.

Martin Luther King was never an up close and personal figure in the United States.

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.