Quotes About Rationalization

Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong things for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right and that we admit the wrong, that we do not lie to ourselves and convince ourselves that what we do is right.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.

But hypocrisy is established when evil is clearly visible through the fog of rationalization—when rationalization is seen for what it is. So hypocrisy is not an act of evil; it is the pretense of innocence even as one is clearly in league with evil, and with all the duplicities and deceptions that serve evil.

had shown a light on his little evil through the fog of his rationalizations.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: "How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?"—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I'm rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I've survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS os some other unpleasant alternative.

He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn't corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they'd been naïve before and now they were savvy.

Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success. "Success," said IBM founder T. J. Watson, "is on the far side of failure." But not to acknowledge a mistake, not to correct it and learn from it, is a mistake of a different order. It usually puts a person on a self-deceiving, self-justifying path, often involving rationalization (rational lies) to

How do you minimize product duplication?" or "How do you rationalize product investments on a global basis?

Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life.

Tyranny grows slowly, and asks us to retreat in comparatively tiny steps. But each retreat increases the possibility of the next retreat. Each betrayal of conscience, each act of silence (despite the resentment we feel when silenced), and each rationalization weakens resistance and increases the probability of the next restrictive move forward.

Ogor?enje ra?a želju za osvetom. Nudit ?e manje spontanih iskaza ljubavi, sve više racionaliziraju?i njihovu odsutnost.

people don't buy on logic; they buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with logic.

The ease with which one is capable of deluding oneself in this field is legendary.

Spiritual bypassing often adopts a rationale based on using absolute truth to deny or disparage relative truth.

I could see how the Ambossans had hardened their hearts to our humanity. They convinced themselves that we do not feel as they do, so that they do not have to feel anything for us. It's very convenient and lucrative for them.

There is never 'a' lie but immediately a second lie – the one we tell ourselves that we've not told a lie.

Perpetrators absolve their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes.

The human mind's capacity to persuade itself of things it wants to believe is damn near limitless.