Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.”

— Daniel Kahneman

152. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

154. “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

155. “The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized: Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

156. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

159. “Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

161. “The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary.”

— Daniel Kahneman

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

167. “Little repetition is needed for learning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

177. “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

178. “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality – but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.”

— Daniel Kahneman

179. “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

180. “You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”

— Daniel Kahneman

181. “The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad. The statement “Hitler loved dogs and little children” is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect. Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.”

— Daniel Kahneman

182. “If there was one ubiquitous recommendation about marriage it was this: “Don’t go to bed angry.””

— Daniel Kahneman

183. “People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

184. “We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

185. “Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo.”

— Daniel Kahneman

186. “Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the.”

— Daniel Kahneman

187. “When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

188. “When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking.”

— Daniel Kahneman

189. “We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

190. “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”

— Daniel Kahneman

191. “People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.”

— Daniel Kahneman

192. “Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

193. “Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.”

— Daniel Kahneman

194. “System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

195. “Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett.”

— Daniel Kahneman

196. “We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”

— Daniel Kahneman

197. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?”

— Daniel Kahneman

198. “The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

— Daniel Kahneman

199. “The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.”

— Daniel Kahneman

200. “It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.”

— Daniel Kahneman