People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how people prefer comforting falsehoods over the uncomfortable truths that require critical thinking and accountability.
Brooks Atkinson's quote illustrates a common human tendency to embrace false beliefs as they offer an easy escape from the complexities of reality. It suggests that the avoidance of self-reflection and personal responsibility leads individuals to find solace in untruths, thereby inhibiting their ability to think critically and confront challenging ideas.
In practice
In a discussion on cognitive biases, this quote can serve as a reminder to critically evaluate our beliefs.
This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
A good End cannot sanctify evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.
Adults are only obsolete children.
PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by the most courageous.
In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.
It will be necessary for us Indians - Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis and all others to whom India is their home - to recognize a common flag to live and die for.
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