
“The truth is… you think what people want you to think.”
Source: Haunted
"Jonathan Bailey: Why romance is such serious business for Jonathan Bailey" in the Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2022-05-24/jonathan-bailey-viscount-anthony-bridgerton (26 May 2022)
“The truth is… you think what people want you to think.”
Source: Haunted
2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)
Harry Potter in Ch. 65 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/65/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)
Context: Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.
“And you know that when the truth is told that you can get what you want or you can just get old.”
Variant: You can get what you want or you can just get old.
The NFL Would Not Have Banned A Donald Sterling For Life (May 7, 2014)
Twitter post, https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/350753146445893633 (2015-03-03)
2010s
“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”
Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)
Variant: You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
On how success is earned in “GOLDIE HAWN” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/goldie-hawn in Interview Magazine (2017 Apr 25)