Quotes About Self-delusion

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?

She wished Bennie were here; only Bennie could appreciate the depth of self-delusion she was witnessing. "Let me get this straight," she said. "You want to do a lot of interviews and press around the fact that you're an ailing and decrepit shadow of your former self. And then you want to do a tour—

I'm a very conservative businessman. I don't work on credit. My father was the guy who taught me how to think straight, not to delude myself and think I was larger than I was.

There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.

Yet Allied unity remained the central principle of his command and he would go to great lengths to preserve it, including self-delusion. "The team is working well," he wrote Marshall in September.

he is awash in self-delusion, a condition especially dangerous in people who have significant power over others. Dimon doesn't see how he has contributed to the mess we're in. He doesn't acknowledge the inconsistencies between his preferred self-image as "patriot first" and his roles as CEO of America's largest bank and chair of the Business Roundtable. He doesn't understand how he has hijacked the system.

It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.

Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing 'climate exposure' - as it's now called by money managers - cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion.

She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.

Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat at the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth.

All the rage – including the wild, destructive misandry, the double-think and the self-delusion – stem from this fact: that we are being not just asked, but expected, to radically alter our lives and societies on the basis of claims that our instincts all tell us cannot possibly be true.

Most of the bad guys in the real world don't know that they are bad guys. You don't get a flashing warning sign that you're about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren't looking.

Honest men in prison know that there is no such thing as "brainwashing" or "breaking." These expressions of self-delusion never find use behind bars. They are just unfortunate metaphors that allow people outside prison to be less uncomfortable in discussing human limitations.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

When I was playing Ajax, he thinks he's a hero; he thinks he's saving people. He thinks he's helping Wade Wilson by turning him into Deadpool.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.

Perhaps, he considered, her hypocrisy had become so ingrained that she was no longer even capable of perceiving it as such.

He'd dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom. Did he really expect me to believe he'd done so ingenuously, blundering forward with a heart full of the best intentions? I think he did. What was more, in that moment at least, he seemed to believe it himself.

It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man.

If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I think the truth , which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence and self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.

it examines the abuse of language in the small talk of women, the big talk of men, in prattle, insult, gossip, curses and the bearing of false witness both through lies and self-delusion.