Quotes About Gullibility

How illimitable is the gullibility of mankind, especially, it must be said, when combined with provincial ignorance. But Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; that is to say, "If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled." Thus quoth Petronius, in the days of Our Lord, an aphorism just as pertinent to our own time.

I told him a story, Calista. People will follow you anywhere if you tell them a tale they desperately want to believe. It's astonishing, really, how gullible even the most skeptical person can be if he or she wants to believe.

April fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.

People were fascinated by the idea of someone pulling the wool over their eyes.

No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.

A certain portion of the human race has certainly a taste for being diddled.

Cody was a classic résumé-bloater, a braggart impresario who prospered by exploiting the gullibility of the American people, most of whom are so poorly read, so bamboozled by religion and the sensationalist, mogul-worshipping press, and so desperate for heroes, that they'll believe almost anything that a grand bullshitter like Cody shovels out.

If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

This was a religious problem, my father felt; people can want to be deceived. Do not deceive, the Kotzker rebbe insisted, and that also means do not deceive oneself by being gullible.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Broken Minds, The easiest way to program a foolish mind is to tell them something that they know nothing about and proceed to make them believe it without doing any research for themselves, "Broken Minds" -MillYentei

Surely, your crappy art can fake out twelve stupid people. I've seen it done with one or two.

I have always suspected everyone who likes me of having poor judgment. I despise them for being so easily taken in.

Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.

Hitler's treatment of the Austrian President Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Czech President Emil Hácha and the British and French leaders had been characterized by hucksterism, bullying and constant piling on of pressure, to which they had responded with a combination of gullibility, appeasement and weary resignation. Yet with his lifelong enemies the Bolsheviks, Hitler was attentive and respectful, though of course no less duplicitous. Their time would come.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.

People will believe anything it it means they can go on with their lives and not have to think too hard about it.

People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be weak or flawed in some way: we believed that of them because it made us feel better; it was as simple as that.

Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he who gets the most out of life.

In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Amazing the rubbish idiots will believe if you shout it loudly enough.

Foolhardy to put your trust where it is easy to create falsehood.