A Quote by Demosthenes

There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases it is the easiest thing of all to deceive ones self.

Demosthenes

Quote Topics

Cases Deal Deceive Easiest Easiest Thing Great Great Deal Self Thing Thinking Wishful Wishful Thinking

Quote Author

Demosthenes
Greek - Statesman
382 BC - 322 BC

Wishful thinking did not give Oregonians the bottle bill. Wishful thinking did not give the public access to beaches. Nor can we expect wishful thinking to turn around a decades-long disinvestment in our higher education system.

Ted Wheeler

The easiest person to deceive is one's self.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

[There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away.

Irving Langmuir

Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.

William S. Burroughs

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

Benjamin Franklin

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.

Alan Watts

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Thomas Sowell

The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.

Madeleine L'Engle

Wishful thinking is one thing, and reality another.

Jalal Talabani

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

Richard Dawkins

The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.

Vaclav Smil

The idea of the self interests me a great deal. What is the self? And finding yourself, and which self? In a way, we're more than one self, but you somehow try to get to a rock bottom self.

Malcolm Morley

We have hopes that we can see rational American presidents; fair, obey the international law, deal with other countries according to mutual respect, parity, etc., but we all know that this is only wishful thinking and fantasy.

Bashar al-Assad

The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate. – When people ask you to tell them what to do, resist.