Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Question: So investors shouldn’t delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: “They’re just not going to do it. It’s just not going to happen.””

— Daniel Kahneman

252. “Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.”

— Daniel Kahneman

253. “You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”

— Daniel Kahneman

254. “The premortem is not a panacea and does not provide complete protection against nasty surprises, but it goes some way toward reducing the damage of plans that are subject to the biases of WYSIATI and uncritical optimism.”

— Daniel Kahneman

255. “I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

256. “People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.”

— Daniel Kahneman

257. “Bernoulli’s model lacks the idea of a reference point, expected utility theory does not represent the obvious fact that the outcome that is good for Anthony is bad for Betty. His model could explain Anthony’s risk aversion, but it cannot explain Betty’s risk-seeking preference for the gamble, a behavior that is often observed in entrepreneurs and in generals when all their options are bad.”

— Daniel Kahneman

258. “Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.”

— Daniel Kahneman

259. “The halo effect adds the final touches, lending an aura of invincibility to the heroes of the story.”

— Daniel Kahneman

260. “My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.”

— Daniel Kahneman

261. “Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought – the expert and the heuristic.”

— Daniel Kahneman

262. “For example, I recently came to doubt my long-held impression that adultery is more common among politicians than among physicians or lawyers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

263. “We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”

— Daniel Kahneman

264. “There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

266. “One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.”

— Daniel Kahneman

267. “A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end – the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.”

— Daniel Kahneman

268. “This set of choices has a lot to tell us about the limits of human rationality. For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is – a hopeless mirage.”

— Daniel Kahneman

269. “There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

271. “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.”

— Daniel Kahneman

272. “A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

273. “Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct.”

— Daniel Kahneman

274. “There’s a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.”

— Daniel Kahneman

275. “My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making – from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.”

— Daniel Kahneman

276. “Some stereotypes are perniciously wrong, and hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences, but the psychological facts cannot be avoided: stereotypes, both correct and false, are how we think of categories.”

— Daniel Kahneman

277. “In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start.”

— Daniel Kahneman

278. “Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

280. “An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

281. “Zajonc argued that the effect of repetition on liking is a profoundly im- portant biological fact, and that it extends to all animals.”

— Daniel Kahneman

282. “I’m not a great believer in self-help.”

— Daniel Kahneman

283. “People’s mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.”

— Daniel Kahneman

284. “We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They’re much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low – the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

285. “I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort – no more than retaining two or three digits.”

— Daniel Kahneman

286. “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

287. “When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

289. “You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious. Still, it took us years to explore the implications of thinking about outcomes as gains and losses.”

— Daniel Kahneman

290. “Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

291. “I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

292. “Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith – a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.”

— Daniel Kahneman

293. “And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday.”

— Daniel Kahneman

294. “If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.”

— Daniel Kahneman

295. “How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

296. “I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”

— Daniel Kahneman

297. “The brain scientists are the wave of the future in the financial world. If you seek to maximize understanding, whether you’re in academia or in the investment community, you’d better pay serious attention to them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

298. “Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.”

— Daniel Kahneman

299. “Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.”

— Daniel Kahneman

300. “Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles – and.”

— Daniel Kahneman