Quotes About Rationalization

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.

Everyone's constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.

The truth is, we are a culture built on a reward system, and our instinctive pursuit of pleasure can often lead us astray. We will rationalize anything into an excuse to indulge in whatever it is that makes us feel temporarily satiated.

The truth is if you can eat just a serving size, you can eat anything. But we all know how those harmless treats can call out your name all night long, and rationalizing in the middle of the night is very easy.

If we rationalize our problems when He points them out, we will spend less and less time meditating because we won't want to face God in that area of our lives.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

We begin selling ourselves on what we want to do rather than what we ought to do. We listen to ourselves until we believe our own lies, and the we opt for happiness.

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something

Logic is simply the language of convenient rationalization in a pseudo-science-loving civilization.

Anyone could reason themselves into a corner, and so justify surrender.

It's very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It's not just because they are evil, but because that's how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It's always interesting figuring out how that happens.

It's not simply that these "cool dudes" deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to rationalize profiting from the meltdown.

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. (...) When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.

I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do.

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

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. —George Orwell (1946)

Naïve realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are open-minded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion, and, two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren't, I wouldn't hold it.

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.

it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.

Curiosity, rationalization, and laziness are no match against courage, self-control, and mental toughness.

the best lies told were the ones we tell ourselves.

Logic is what the devil likes most.

When we feel deprived we try to make it right, and that makes it easier to rationalize our behavior. It's easier to say I need this. I deserve this. But Patanjali says the opposite is true: If we don't take what isn't ours (asteya), we will flourish.