Quotes About Rationalization

It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

si verdaderamente quieres encontrar una disculpa para justificar cualquier cosa, ten la plena seguridad que la hallarás sin mayor dificultad.

Most every old civilizations looks at others--members of the same species but not of the same tribe--as wild men. It's a common rationalization, because when you reduce someone else to a level of something like an animal, it makes them easier to kill.

For example, your man might think: I don't steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

A man's alibi is the child of his own imagination. It is human nature to defend one's own brain-child.

which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can't reach got to be sour).

they can cherry-pick from statements they've made in the past, many of them contradictory, and end up convincing themselves of their intellectual lucidity

you need to know whether you do not like the pursuit of money and wealth because you genuinely do not like it, or because you are rationalizing your inability to be successful at it with the argument that wealth is not a good thing because it is bad for one's digestive system or disturbing for one's sleep or other such arguments.

There is a category of people, generally finance academics, who, instead of fitting their actions to their brains, fit their brains to their actions. These people go back and unwittingly cheat with the statistics to justify their actions. In my business, they fool themselves with statistical arguments to justify their option selling.

You may think I'm crazy, but I don't feel like I've done anything wrong. He deserved to die, so I've decided to pretend that he just went off somewhere instead of coming home tonight.

Fiction is all too often one rationalisation away from reality. (from the acknowledgements of Unwind)

The missiles come first, and the justifications come second.

Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett's and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.

I don't know if anybody thinks of themselves as bad. We all have excuses.

When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.