But a lot of our thinking is caught up in dwelling on the past, trying to control the future, generating misperceptions, and worrying about what others are thinking.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present.

We have come to confuse information with understanding.

But sometimes the lies we let ourselves believe are for our own good.

We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.

We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.

All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

"The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the "happiness of mankind" as its promise."

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.

Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot.

We mistakenly believe that who we were is who we are, thus limiting our true potential in the present, based on the limitations of our past.