Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

The quote identifies self-deception as effortless because it exploits a basic bias: desire shapes belief. People tend to treat what they want as evidence for what is true, smoothing over contradictions and discounting unwelcome information. In a civic context, the warning is political as well as personal: communities can be manipulated—or can manipulate themselves—by preferring pleasant illusions to hard realities. The line implies that intellectual honesty requires active resistance: checking motives, seeking disconfirming facts, and separating hopes from judgments. Its enduring force lies in how succinctly it captures motivated reasoning, a phenomenon recognized in antiquity and central to modern psychology.