Quotes About Credulity

The man who will demand ten signatures upon a promissory note and look askance at you if you tell him of interplanetary distances, will swallow any idle fable, no matter how absurd, if it be boldly asserted and surrounded with sufficient nonsensical mummery and labeled as a religion.

I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.

We never read the full explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy.

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!

Believe me there's no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can't get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it—

There had never been a shortage of fools in the world

Among those who said they had heard something about it, 60 percent said they had completely believed it and 8 percent said that they had believed it in part. Among the rest, 14 percent said they had not believed it at first, and 18 percent said that they had not believed it at all.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

If we believe miracles cannot happen today but happened to our distant ancestors, what we really seem to be saying is not that miracles happened back then but, rather, that all those people back then were naive enough to believe they happened. It is to say that miracles never happened, but gullible people thought they did.

It takes two to make a lie: one to tell it and the other to believe it.

Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.

The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it.

Why had the counterfeit timbre of his voice rung true to me? What had prompted me to believe a man who spent most of his life dissembling? Why had I, usually so suspicious, become so credulous and simpleminded in his presence? Was it just that I had wanted to hear someone tell me he loved me? Was it just that the words he spoke, the vows he swore, were so freighted with sweetness that they would have seemed true no matter who spoke them?

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.

When they tell me things I wish to hear, I invariably believe them.

Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.

In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

I couldn't make myself be cautious around her. A little voice in my head kept trying to tell me that every word she said could be disinformation and that she might be playing me for a fool. But I didn't believe it. I trusted her, even though I had every reason not to.

Then I will tell you something. I do not believe in it. Forty years among men has consistently taught me that they are not amenable to common sense. Show them the red tail of a comet, fill them with black terror, and they will all come running out of their houses and break their legs. But tell them one sensible proposition and support it with seven reasons, and they will simply laugh in your face

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.