“The contrasts and contradictions that can permanently live peacefully side by side in a skull make all the systems of political optimists and pessimists illusory.”
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Source: Aphorisms for Leo Baeck, 1953
About this quote
Human beings can hold incompatible convictions without feeling the conflict between them. That psychological fact weakens political theories that expect people to behave as consistently optimistic or consistently pessimistic types.
When to use it
- A voter demands personal liberty in one issue while supporting tight control in another.
- A manager praises experimentation but punishes the first project that produces an honest failure.
- A researcher lists competing assumptions explicitly before interpreting an ambiguous result.