This was not Wordsworth's viewpoint at all. The words are in fact those of Bertrand Russell in his Sceptical Essays (1928), p. 157.
Misattributed
“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism”
11 November 2018, French>English translation reported by Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/to-mark-end-of-world-war-i-frances-macron-denounces-nationalism-as-a-betrayal-of-patriotism/2018/11/11/aab65aa4-e1ec-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html?utm_term=.c725846970fd
2017, 2018
Interview with Charles Krauthammer: America's "Great Success Story", in Middle East Quarterly (December 1994)
1990s, 1994
“5426. We are apt to believe what we wish for.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
1850s, West India Emancipation (1857)
Context: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [... ] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
Ce qui nous fait croire si facilement que les autres ont des défauts, c'est la facilité que l'on a de croire ce qu'on souhaite.
Variant translation: What makes us believe so easily that others have faults is the ease with which we believe what we hope for.
Maxim 25 from the Manuscrit de Liancourt.
Later Additions to the Maxims
