Quotes About Self-delusion

Self-delusion is rarely a good strategy for effective management.

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.

Every villain is a hero in his own mind.

Every villain is a hero in their own mind.

Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so its no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else.

I was foolish because I believed in you. You are a fool because you believe in yourself!

Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.

Life is a planetary level phenomonon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhethoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.

You design the vulgar pots and sell them to the vulgar people. When you start believing them, you become fraudulent, Miss Nina. You make a plausible adjustment to the facts of life. I don't. And that isn't a virtue on my part. It's the disease of permanent adolescence. Honey, when you take your tongue out of your cheek, you become suspect.

And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it otherwise might have been.

Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.

I can navigate the canals of self-delusion, say, like nobody's business. The less certain something is, the more I understand it; the less tangible it is, the more readily my fingers grasp it. Just give me a little shove down the byways of regret, and I'm in my element. Which

we live in a country where people believe implicitly in their right to bore the living shit out of absolutely everybody within haranguing distance with tales of their miserable, lonely, and inevitably self-deluding searches for personal fulfillment in the emotional desert that is our crass commercial culture.

And self-delusion in the upper economic reaches of the left risks turning the Democratic Party into a home for an affluent, educated elite that seeks to correct every form of injustice except the inequality

If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.

Society, like most fashionable dames, is fond of selfdelusion, and is very apt to break in shivers the mirror that reflects her decolletee too faithfully. Now, the novelist is a painter who draws his portrait on canvas which a stone or two of censure will not break; but the playwright's fragile glass falls to atoms unless braced in a gilded frame of popularity. Critical hostility is often the breath of life to the writer; but to the actor it is absolute damnation

Yet I've come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.