Gullibility

Gullibility is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence.

Quotes

• There's a sucker born every minute.
  • Attributed to Phineas Barnum

• When lovely woman stoops to folly,
    And finds too late that men betray,
  What charm can soothe her melancholy,
    What art can wash her guilt away?
  The only art her guilt to cover,
    To hide her shame from every eye,
  To give repentance to her lover,
    And wring his bosom—is to die.
  • Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
  • Variant: And wring his bosom, is—to die.

• [W]here men are heated by zeal and enthusiasm, there is no degree of human testimony so strong as may not be procured for the greatest absurdity.
  • David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1740), Of Miracles

• Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
  • Thomas Jefferson to James Smith (Monticello, 8 December 1822)
  • Reported in: John P. Kaminski, ed., The Quotable Jefferson (2006), p. 94