The Story Paradox Quotes

“The world is spinning down a post-truth vortex of media bubbles, fake news, and feral confirmation bias.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“Bad people,” in the main, are simply those who had the misfortune first to encounter, and then to believe, the wrong storytellers.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“But when it comes to the villains and victimizers of history, we have a failure of empathetic imagination.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“Of course, no one thinks that science, an institution run by flawed humans, is perfect. But it’s also true that even the harshest critics of science won’t claim that they’d prefer to return to a prescientific age.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“We are all products of some combination of genetics and social conditioning, which means that our personal tendencies and traits are not self-built.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“Historical storytelling—not just in America but everywhere—frequently amounts to a kind of revenge fantasy, where the malefactors of our past can be resurrected, tried, and convicted for violating moral codes they frequently hadn’t heard of.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“A story is always an artificial, post-hoc fabrication with dubious correspondence to the past.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“Narrative history, I propose, can be defined as the imposition of the imagination of the present on the defenseless corpse of the past.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“sometimes—maybe more often than not—amnesia is better than memory.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”)”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“Because made-up stories tend to end happily, psychologists find that heavy fiction consumers, when compared to heavy news consumers, have greater confidence that they live in a “nice world” rather than a “mean world.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“bad information—so long as it makes a good story—tends to outcompete a dull story packed with high-quality information.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

“The Russian blitzkrieg of narratives is among the most brilliant, devastating, and far-reaching propaganda attacks in history. It’s still not clear whether this”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down