Prejudice- christiansquoting.org.uk

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. - Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) "Patterns of Culture," ch. 1, 1934

he eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. -- Henri Bergson

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones." - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Who needs debate, the Left rationalizes, when those who disagree are bigoted, homophobic, sexist pigs? Dealing with their arguments is a just a waste of time. In this model, dissenters begin to look less and less like members of society with a right to their own opinions and more and more like speed bumps on the road to social change. -- Tammy Bruce, _The New Thought Police_, 2001

Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions. Samuel Butler

People only see what they are prepared to see.... Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no way of proving your point to someone whose income or position depends on believing the contrary. ~Sidney Harris, "Pieces of Eight"

What we perceive and understand depends upon what we are. --Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) _Ends and Means_ [1937], "Beliefs"

I'm not going to disguise the fact that I despise Ronald Reagan.
Justin Kaplan, editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th ed., on his near-exclusion of Regan quotes.

Too many of our prejudices are like pyramids upside down. They rest on tiny, trivial incidents, but they spread upward and outward until they fill our minds. - William McChesney Martin, 1906 - 1998

How strange it is to see with how much passion People see things only in their own fashion~Jean Molière, The School for Wives : A Comedy in Five Acts (1662)

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.--Montaigne, _Essays_

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them. -- Edward R. Murrow

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.- Anais Nin (1903 &endash; 1977)

Prejudice is one of the world's greatest labor-saving devices; it enables you to form an opinion without having to dig up the facts. ~ Laurence Peter

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure anew each time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect them to fit me. -- George Bernard Shaw

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions. Jessamyn West

Nature's noblemen are everywhere, in town and out of town, gloved and rough-handed, rich and poor. Prejudice against a lord because he is a lord, is losing the chance of finding a good fellow, as much as prejudice against a ploughman because he is a ploughman.-- Nathaniel Parker Willis, 19thC