Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the...

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.

If there was one overriding element to Faraday’s character, it was humility. His ‘conviction of deficiency,’ as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life....

Scientists are human—they’re as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.

Public stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about a group (e.g., dangerousness, incompetence, character weakness)PrejudiceAgreement with belief and/or negative emotional reaction (e.g., anger, fear)DiscriminationBehavior response to prejudice (e.g., avoidance, withhold employment and housing opportunities, withhold help)Self-stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about the...

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.

We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely...

We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it.

Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people’s experiences as an interpretive lens.

Political centrism ≠ neutrality. Being a centrist doesn’t make you unbiased; it biases you in favour of the centre.

Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is sleeping or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or...

It’s time for the Boy Scouts to open its membership to LGBT adults once and for all. Only then can they claim to have anything to teach our children.

This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became...

Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike...

There is always a storm. There is always rain. Some experience it. Some live through it. And others are made from it.

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military – or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway – in its focus on concrete results. How else...

…[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. … Unless this job...

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may...

Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to...

When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.

It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.

Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.

Mirrors lie.

Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment,...

Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words?

…the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.

Results of two independent factor analyses of the survey responses of more than 2000 English and American citizens parallel these findings (19,33):- fear and exclusion: persons with severe mental illness should be feared and, therefore,...

Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When “I” is replaced by “We”, illness becomes wellness.

DONNA: “She said she knew it in her heart. Do you know how many times I’ve been wrong about things I knew in my heart?

Mental illness” is among the most stigmatized of categories.’ People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

At best, people are open to scrutinizing themselves and considering their blind spots; at worst, they become defensive and angry.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Historical revisionists find what they set out to find.

Even though the Judge would charge the jury that they should listen to all the evidence before they made up their minds, the chances were likely that 100% of them will have already decided if...

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and...

Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a ‘footnote’ to colonial history about the ‘revolt’ of the American colonies....

Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it’s “tradition.

By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth,...

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been...

When we want to see someone in a certain way, we find a way, but when we don’t we have to wake up and see who they truly are and not what our pain or...

Facts and values are entangled in science. It’s not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility...

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental...

As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic...

You can never make someone like something they don’t like, but you can always help them to better understand it.

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a...