Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought – the expert and the heuristic.”

— Daniel Kahneman

252. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “Prospect theory turned out to be the most significant work we ever did, and our article is among the most often cited in the social sciences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to – and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that’s the way the mind works. It’s an association machine.”

— Daniel Kahneman

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.”

— Daniel Kahneman

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

281. “A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”

— Daniel Kahneman

282. “Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”

— Daniel Kahneman

283. “Risk” does not exist “out there,” independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.”

— Daniel Kahneman

284. “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

285. “The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point – well, that wasn’t how psychology was done at the time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

286. “In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

288. “I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

290. “Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.”

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

— Daniel Kahneman

293. “The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

294. “For example, the question “Do you now feel a slight numbness in your left leg?” always prompts quite a few people to report that their left leg does indeed feel a little strange.”

— Daniel Kahneman

295. “People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.”

— Daniel Kahneman

296. “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

297. “People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.”

— Daniel Kahneman

298. “Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

299. “There’s a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.”

— Daniel Kahneman

300. “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