Quotes About Bias

based on them, I was later to learn, make all sides involved in the war look even worse than we believed them to be at the time, including Western governments

I was inclined to think him Jewish," she wrote; she "considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.

Once a man forms an opinion, he starts interpreting facts in the light of that belief. He ceases to be an impartial judge of facts.

We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it's okay to hate those other people because they're the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.

know for a fact that if we did as many drug searches of rich white schools as we do poor black ones, there'd be an outcry about our "lack of discretion." It's tricky on both sides.

The real danger is that the good guys will blindly keep doing bad things that they don't see as bad. It's why people who would give the shirt off their back to help the poor and the hungry will then march against genetically modified food, even if such food products could save millions of children from blindness or starvation

Each one helps us understand that our points of view are shaped by what we see, what we've been told, and, lastly, how we process it all.

To reduce the desperately difficult moral decisions that Churchill and many others had to take to the level of accusations of deliberate genocide is biased and unhistorical.

everyone who exists is mentally compromised. We all accumulate false information over time, internalize it, and are influenced by it, consciously or otherwise. We are, in part, a product of these biases, as well as all other information we gather in our lifetimes.

Both parties aren't capable of anything other than a strongly emotional evaluation of the consequences, while ignoring the causes.

There is nothing worse than chauvinism underpinned by scholarship.

That's the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth.

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

most of us want to be proven right more than we want to know what's true. We aren't on truth quests. We're on confirmation quests.

I saw Deep Purple live once and I paid money for it and I thought, 'Geez, this is ridiculous.' You just see through all that sort of stuff. I never liked those Deep Purples or those sort of things. I always hated it. I always thought it was a poor man's Led Zeppelin.

He was a man who'd turned his personal likes and dislikes into a moral code; because he didn't enjoy spending money in the Woodyard cafe, there was something morally suspect about the people who did. The Brethren had been much the same. Matthew thought they'd created a God in their own image, hard, cold and inflexible.

We tend to give a moral weight to the things with which we're most comfortable, don't you think?

The New York Times editorial page is like a Ouija board that has only three answers, no matter what the question. The answers are: higher taxes, more restrictions on political speech and stricter gun control.

Throw in "never read books" and you have the dictionary definition of a liberal. Being completely uninformed is precisely how most liberals stay liberal.

It's often said that those who are unduly bothered by gays are latent homosexuals. Isn't it possible that people obsessed with racism are themselves racist.

When a poll is really, really out of whack with what I want to happen, I do have a tendency to disregard it.

If you're differently-abled, if you're a person of color, if you express your identity in a way that's different from the norm, for whatever reason, there's an implicit bias where people, frankly, sometimes take you less seriously.

Bald guys have been playing the bad guy for a long time, whether it's pirates, thieves, murderers, or whatnot, so the deck is a little bit stacked against you in that regard.

When you have 20 nominations - 20 names on the nomination list of best actor, supporting actor and actress, etc., and there's absolutely no representation of color whatsoever, I think that's a subset of perhaps a bigger problem.