Quotes About Defensiveness

She lifted her head. "It's easier," she said, slowly, "to be angry on someone else's behalf than on my own. And yet I find I have a well of anger in me, that I have been filling for years from my own hurts. If I spill it out in defense of another, I can deny it's mine.

We often frame internal innovation challenges by asking, How can we protect the internal startup from the parent organization? I would like to reframe and reverse the question: How can we protect the parent organization from the startup? In my experience, people defend themselves when they feel threatened, and no innovation can flourish if defensiveness is given free rein. In fact, this is why the common suggestion to hide the innovation team is misguided.

A menacing snarl came from Frostfur. "What are you doing here?

There will be no conversation in which you call me a racist, and I explain why I'm not a racist. That's a conversation for idiots.

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.

I build a wall around myself. I'm hard to get to know. Any trait you have, it gets worse as you go along.

The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong.

I wanted to leap up and defend her, perhaps throw my arms around her and protect her, but I just sat there like a nincompoop.

Never defend yourself. Make no excuse. Defensiveness and excuses are unbecoming to you. Smoothly recognize your wrong, apologize, and give thanks to God. Then you will be evaluated as a great person. The more you run away, the smaller you become. How dare you transfer your responsibility to others! A great person is one who can take all the responsibility alone.

he seemed to see himself as a king barricaded in his castle, with thousands of soldiers in the battlement, the sights of their rifles trained on potential intruders.

The New "Why" Question Generally, you don't want to begin conversations with "Why" questions because, as mentioned before, they have a tendency to put people on the defense. It

The lowest level of communication coming out of low-trust situations would be characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness, and often legalistic language, which covers all the bases and spells out qualifiers and the escape clauses in the event things go sour. Such communication produces only Win/Lose or Lose/Lose. It isn't effective—there's no P/PC balance—and it creates further reasons to defend and protect.

Right about now, he'd like to have a stamp that said "Mine, stay the hell away" to put right on her forehead.

By far the most dominant of the trio is the Protest Polka. In this dialogue, one partner becomes critical and aggressive and the other defensive and distant. Psychologist John Gottman of the University of Washington in Seattle finds that couples who get stuck in this pattern in the first few years of marriage have more than an 80 percent chance of divorcing within four or five years.

What? Are you on crack? I did no such thing.

When you're the guy inside of a character and you've lived with it for almost two years, you're always a bit defensive about the character, and you want to root for the character you're playing.

People believe what they believe when they are shown something that may be new and different to what they know. It's instinctive to be defensive.

She was standing at the door defenseless, dressed like a queen and yet completely vulnerable and submissive, her pride relinquished. She had exposed herself in an act of pure courage, and that made him love her even more.

He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being." I love you. As you please. Where she would have had a spirited argument only, an exchange of ideas, a clash of hard and different points of view with a friend, with him she had tried to destroy. She had tried to tear him to pieces, to wreck him, to obliterate him. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

Ich bin ein Mensch mit kaltem Herzen. Wenn ich mit einem großen Kummer zu tun habe, errichte ich Barrieren, damit das Gefühl des Verlusts nicht zu tief, nicht zu weit eindringen kann. Sofort gibt es eine Mauer, die uneinnehmbar ist. (S. 161)

You know how it happens when sometimes one starts arguing, knowing well that one is in the wrong, and this knowledge just makes one get more vicious and unbending in argument?

Insults are the last resort of an insecure man with a crumbling argument

I can't deny the impact of, obviously, becoming a father and having my son come into this world, and even becoming a husband. The irony is that, when people think that in certain ways it softens you, in many ways, I'm more defensive and more on guard and more frightened and more angry at everything in this world now that I have them to worry about.

When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping.