Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. (Roughly: It's easy for men to believe what they want to.)

Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to
believe, no matter the conflicting evidence.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.

As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

When a man gets into his head an idea that the public voice calls for him, it is astonishing how great becomes his trust in the wisdom of the public.

I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, <b>they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner</b>. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.

It was his nature to believe anything, before he would believe he could be wrong.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.

As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are thought not only acceptable but redeeming — even necessary.