Quotes from Carol Tavris

History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence.

For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.

The second-sweetest set of three words in English is 'I don't know.'

Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.

History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.

It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn't fit it.

What, then, was the new strategy he proposed? More troops and more money. For him, any other option was unthinkable. It would mean he had made a colossal mistake.

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

God is in the truth.

What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?" It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly's great character Pogo, who famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us.

It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them. —playwright Lillian Hellman

A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell (1946)

There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple likelihood that you will probably be found out anyway—by

We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility."3 That doesn't cut it.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. —historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle

Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye—it constricts.

Naïve realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are open-minded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion, and, two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren't, I wouldn't hold it.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.