Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

152. “In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you’ll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.”

— Daniel Kahneman

153. “Each additional day together is a gift. The end of the day means the end of hostilities, the recognition that the underlying shared values and commitment to the relationship trump the need for one last dig or self-righteous justification.”

— Daniel Kahneman

154. “So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.”

— Daniel Kahneman

155. “Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.”

— Daniel Kahneman

156. “People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.”

— Daniel Kahneman

157. “Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

158. “This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

159. “The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

160. “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality.”

— Daniel Kahneman

161. “Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.”

— Daniel Kahneman

162. “All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It’s the storage of our personal experiences. It’s a very big deal.”

— Daniel Kahneman

163. “Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.”

— Daniel Kahneman

164. “Let’s not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.”

— Daniel Kahneman

165. “A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success;.”

— Daniel Kahneman

166. “The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.”

— Daniel Kahneman

167. “Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

168. “To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.”

— Daniel Kahneman

169. “Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

170. “Most things that couples disagree upon aren’t worth more than a day’s combat...”

— Daniel Kahneman

171. “The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered – hence the image of an anchor.”

— Daniel Kahneman

172. “Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they’re very likely to be wrong.”

— Daniel Kahneman

173. “Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.”

— Daniel Kahneman

174. “The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.”

— Daniel Kahneman

175. “The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see.”

— Daniel Kahneman

176. “Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.”

— Daniel Kahneman

177. “Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

178. “System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.”

— Daniel Kahneman

179. “Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.”

— Daniel Kahneman

180. “In the absence of a competing intuition, logic prevails.”

— Daniel Kahneman

181. “In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

— Daniel Kahneman

182. “Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.”

— Daniel Kahneman

183. “The remembering self is the one that answers the question: “How was it, on the whole?” Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

— Daniel Kahneman

184. “The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

185. “The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

186. “Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!”

— Daniel Kahneman

187. “We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla “invisible” by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

188. “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.”

— Daniel Kahneman

189. “I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.”

— Daniel Kahneman

190. “Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.”

— Daniel Kahneman

191. “As you consider the next question, please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample:.”

— Daniel Kahneman

192. “But of course the main reason that decision theorists study simple gambles is that this is what other decision theorists do. The field had a theory, expected utility theory, which was the foundation of the rational-agent model and is to this day the most important theory in the social sciences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

193. “The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

— Daniel Kahneman

194. “The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

195. “Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions – and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

196. “Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

197. “Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.”

— Daniel Kahneman

198. “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”

— Daniel Kahneman

199. “The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.”

— Daniel Kahneman

200. “All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.”

— Daniel Kahneman