Preface
Taken Care Of (1965)
Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Chindi (2002), Chapter 12 (p. 158), quoting Max Stiner
“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”
Variant: We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
14 January letter to John Martin: 14, Correspondence between John Martin and William Smith O'Brien relative to a French invasion, 1861 https://books.google.com/books?id=uioenbWx30MC&pg=PA14,
“We are all quite capable of believing in anything as long as it's improbable.”
“No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.”
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 34
“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”
Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 13 : Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal
“If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.”
Re: Evolution (24 June 1994) This is derived from a statement of William Blake: "Truth cannot be told, so as to be understood, and not be believ'd."
Variant: If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
“People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.”
"Intense Ornate" interview with Amazon.co.uk (1999) http://www.elizabethhand.com/interview99.shtml
Context: So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.
