James Harvey Robinson Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.

James Harvey Robinson
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

James Harvey Robinson
We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.

James Harvey Robinson
Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.

James Harvey Robinson
It may well be that men of science, not kings, or warriors, or even statesmen are to be the heroes of the future.

James Harvey Robinson
In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

James Harvey Robinson
Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions.

James Harvey Robinson
With supreme irony, the war to "make the world safe for democracy" ended by leaving democracy more unsafe in the world than at any time since the collapse of the revolutions of 1848.

James Harvey Robinson
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.

James Harvey Robinson
Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error.

James Harvey Robinson
Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends.

James Harvey Robinson
Research is mainly looking for things that are not there and attempting processes that will not occur.

James Harvey Robinson
There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves.

James Harvey Robinson
Of all human ambitions an open mind eagerly expectant of new discoveries and ready to remold convictions in the light of added knowledge and dispelled ignorances and misapprehensions, is the noblest, the rarest and the most difficult to achieve.

James Harvey Robinson