Denialism Quotes

“People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.”
― Michael Specter

“Consider a narrow deep river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a long distance downstream.

When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam.

Surprisingly, though, when one gets within a few miles of the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is highest, as you then get closer to the dam the concern falls off to zero! That is, the people living immediately under the dam who are certain to be drowned in a dam burst profess unconcern.

That is because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while living immediately under the high dam is to deny the finite possibility that it could burst.”
― Jared Diamond

“Rise of Science Denialism

The problem is, in a world where some people (even in the USA, where someone like Donald Trump was allowed to rise to the level of a serious presidential candidate in 2016) have descended to such levels of ignorance that science itself is dismissed by leaders, political and religious as ‘an agenda’, and frightening numbers of people cling to ignorance and superstition because it suits their conservative anti-human rights views and objectives.”
― Christina Engela, The Pink Community - The Facts

“Positive thinking is a coping mechanism, an automatic coping mechanism. It is void of life. Feeling and experiencing the realness of what is actually happening are the essences of being alive. Feeling, connecting, reacting to the flow-- this is all living. Positive thinking happens in the head, meanwhile, it denies the heart its authentic, genuine feelings. Not only does it have the potential to rob you of real and deeper connection which is ultimately necessary to living a passionate and compassionate life; but it even has the potential to cut you off from reality itself. A mask that you put on your face, other people's faces, and throw over everything around you. We do not become positive by refusing to be real. We become positive people by really living, really feeling, and really rising above anything that would threaten to sink us. You can't even see what threatens to sink you if you refuse to acknowledge that it's even there. Why did Titanic sink? Someone refused to see the icebergs.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.”
― David Robert Grimes

“Like any pseudo scientific thinking, denialism begins with a desired conclusion. Rather than supporting a controversial or rejected claim, like many pseudo sciences, denialists maintain that a generally accepted scientific or historical claim is not true, usually for ideological reasons. Denialists then engage in what is called motivated reasoning, rationalizing why the undesired claim is not true or at least not proven. They therefore are working backwards from their desired conclusion, filling in justifications for what they believe, rather than following logic and evidence wherever it leads.”
― Steven Novella

“The logic is that of a man falling from a skyscraper who waves to a friend on the fiftieth floor and says it's all fine, just look how many floors I've passed with no problems.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Presented in the mainstream discourse as stimulus-response-driven or genetically programmed automatons, who lack agency and experiential perspective, animals are the archetypal Other, inferior to humans and an object that can be exploited for work, consumer goods, entertainment, science, or killed and displaced at liberty. This instrumental relationship served as a blueprint for the subjection of Nature, which transformed 'fish into fisheries, forests and trees into timber, animals into livestock, wildlife into game, mountains into coal, seashores into beachfronts, rivers into hydroelectric factories' and converted the animals’ homes into resources for unlimited human use and capitalist profit.”
― Tomaž Grušovnik, Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze

“Social Media is full of narcissists who are sad fishing, practicing denialism and logical fallacies. It was supposed to be a place where people make friends, not making enemies out of friends.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“It is wrong to say that there was no antisemitism in the Labour Party. But it is also wrong to say that every allegation of antisemitism in the Labour Party was true. Questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in the party remain a dificult, but important and necessary, subject for rational debate. The charge of 'denialism' killed this nuance. It demanded that anyone exercising scepticism be ejected from the political and moral community as anti-Jewish bigots - even when the sceptics in question were themselves Jewish.”
― Paul Holden, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy