“This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding;my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.”

“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”

“The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.”

“If our subject persuades himself to believe contrary to the evidence in order to evade, somehow, the unpleasant truth to which he has already seen that the evidence points, then and only then is he clearly a self-deceiver.”

“I want to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is reason to hope.”