Quotes About Rationalization

Once you've started cheating, does it really matter what your methods are?

You forgive the person and you endlessly rationalize and you forget... That there are other people out there, says Seb softly, and as he meets my eyes, I feel a sudden tightening in my stomach. Other people. What does he mean? Me? No, don't be stupid, I scold myself at once. Of course he doesn't mean me. He probably means, like, there are loads of people on Tinder.

My experience is that the absence of firm prior resolve results in regular rationalization.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

The way adults could talk themselves into and out of feeling okay about something always amazed her.

What makes humans special is our need to rationalize our actions.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.

The point is that 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.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

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.

Time often serves to justify a deed which seems at first unjustifiable.

And the dangerous thing about excuses is that if we recite them enough times, we actually come to believe they are true.

Adults, Sophie has decided a long time before, were really bad at making up good excuses.

when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.

they are nothing more than pseudo-accounts by which he seeks to satisfy his own reason about a good deed

How can this be justified?

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Paul Fussell has described the two stages of rationalization a combat soldier goes through—it can't happen to me, then it can happen to me, unless I'm more careful—followed by a stage of "accurate perception: it is going to happen to me, and only my not being there [on the front lines] is going to prevent it.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time .

I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don't we?