Quotes About Rationalization

Stephanie Plum, master of rationalization. Believe whatever the moment calls for.

She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted.

Bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany.

In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.

Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

Men's minds are too ingenious in palliating guilt in themselves

In order for us to live comfortably with ourselves while living on unjust terms with others, we have to tell ourselves a story that makes us innocent.

what elaborate lengths we go to fool ourselves)...

Denial—usually in some form of rationalization—is the primary device that humans use to deal with their own wrongness. It was the first thing out of the mouths of Adam and Eve after they sinned, and it continues up to the latest edition of the newspaper. The prophetic witness from God must throw itself against the massive weight of group and individual denial, often institutionalized and subtly built into our customary ways of speaking and interacting.

el enfado es la más seductora de las emociones negativas porque el monólogo interno que lo alienta proporciona argumentos convincentes para justificar el hecho de poder descargarlo sobre alguien.

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

People sell their soul in such small quantities - a seemingly trivial compromise here, a rationalization of a minor evil there - that they don't realize what they're doing until it is too late.

What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.

If you're worried about the possibility of rationalization at home or at work, you need to squeeze out the ambiguity from your goal. You need a black-and-white (B&W) goal. A B&W goal is an all-or-nothing goal, and it's useful in times when you worry about backsliding.

The ambiguity in the goal is allowing rationalization to creep in.

We let rip with idealism and grand words, but it's nothing but rationalizations of our own egoistic behavior. Not only do we lie to others; we also lie to ourselves. Each one of us lives inside a house of mirrors -- our own instinctive self-righteousness distorts the way we view reality so that we can justify our actions to ourselves. And there's no way we can escape.

I suppose it's easier to kill people if you can pretend to yourself that they're not really people at all.

Prejudice assumes the garb of reason, but the cheat is too thin.

Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it.

he knew that men who want something are only too ready to arrange all the evidence to suit their wishful thinking and willingly exclude anything that contradicts it.

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else." Then let's be quiet together.

Some truths were too difficult to accept, so the mind manufactured excuses as a way of denying what it already knew.

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.