Quotes About Self-justification

By choosing not to forgive, I was telling God that I loved my stance of self-justification more than Him.

self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am.

between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there's a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

sensitive lover." From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that "something" than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

Self-justification is complicated enough when it follows our conscious choices and we know we can expect it. But it also occurs in the aftermath of things we do for unconscious reasons, when we haven't a clue about why we hold some belief or cling to some custom but are too proud to admit it.

the policies that permitted it. "Without a mutual acknowledgment of mistakes made, and some form of accountability, another reversion to torture may be difficult to prevent," says political scientist Darius Rejali. "Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity."25 Impunity, in turn, rewards self-justification, not only in the perpetrators but also in the nation that exonerates them.

Don't you see? We've become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, 'I'm angry at him and I didn't express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it's depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.' It's like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we're allowed to do stupid things.

y si tengo algún derecho es el derecho a que no me juzgues de este modo, a no tener que justificarme: ni ante ti ni ante nadie.

Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

Into the echo chamber of his own mind, where he was always able to find a justification for the most terrible actions.

How strange, I thought, that we are able to argue so well against ourselves but so ineffectively _for_ ourselves.

Farmer hauled before constabulary court after attack upon the person of Bose Coggindell, Fellow of the Institute, 54th Degree, in self-justification: "These chaps have it easy. They lean back in their chairs and say, 'Suffer, you'll love it. Do it the hard way. Sweat.' They'd like me to hitch my wife to a plow, the way it used to be done. So I showed him what I thought of what he calls 'detachment'." Justice (after fining farmer 75 SVU):

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

never seem unable to find a reason for thinking I am being virtuous when I make excuses for myself.

If we're focusing on others in an attempt to justify ourselves before God or to "exalt ourselves" as "giants of the faith," we will not only not grow as we ought, but we will also delude ourselves into thinking we're better than we are. And we may be sure that God will humble us. So it is better to humble ourselves and trust in the grace of God than to be opposed by God because of pride (James 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5).