Topic

Prejudices

Prejudice — the judgment formed before the evidence, the attitude that filters new experience through a template made of old assumptions — is one of the most reliable obstacles to accurate understanding and fair treatment. The quotes gathered here examine prejudice in its specific mechanisms, not just its consequences. The most searching voices here probe how prejudice works cognitively: the way categories simplify a complex world at the cost of distorting individual cases, the way social pressure reinforces group-serving beliefs, and the way the certainty that characterizes prejudice is often inversely proportional to actual knowledge of the subject. These reflections also examine the discipline required to identify and resist one's own prejudices — a task that is harder than identifying those of others and more useful. Whether you are thinking about racial, class, religious, or more subtle forms of prejudgment, this collection makes the case for the patient, difficult work of examining one's own assumptions rather than simply deploring prejudice in the abstract.

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Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind

The greatest friend of truth is Time; her greatest enemy is Prejudice.

Source: Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words (1820)

Prejudices are what fools use for reason

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Learning is pedantry, wit, impertinence, virtue itself looked like weakness, and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eye

It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best to at least rearrange their prejudices once in a while

There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.