Quotes About Rationalization

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

Most people who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that the job will improve with time or with an increased income. This is a tempting hallucination that occurs when a job is boring or uninspiring, instead of being pure hell. Pure hell forces action, but anything less than this can be endured with enough rationalization.

Human reason can excuse any evil.

People happily kill other people in the name of everything from a god to a country to an overly developed sense of annoyance when someone cuts across two lanes on a freeway without signaling. Cats will, on occasion, kill other cats but for the most part they are content to puff up their furr, yowl like banshees, and rip the occassional ear off - and all this is usually done for the sake of food or protecting their own territory (which may not be condonable but it is at least rational) .

In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away.

Festinger argued that in reality we usually just find a way to ignore or discount dissonant information.

One of my main agenda right from the beginning has been cost rationalization, and we have done a lot of cost rationalization.

We conclude that most of the time, the future will look a lot like the past, with both up cycles and down cycles. There is a right time to argue that things will be better, and that's when the market is on its backside and everyone is selling things at giveaway prices. It's dangerous when the market's at record levels to reach for a positive rationalisation that has never held true in the past.

Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.

Never could Mathias give the right answer, but always had he an excuse for being wrong. "I was just a thinkin'," he'd fend himself. "If I hadn't been a thinkin', I wouldn't a thought that way.

Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Men?s minds are generally ingenious in palliating guilt in themselves.

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori , makes their actions appear to be logical.

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

An excuse is a lie guarded.

Speeches of self-justification were seldom worthwhile for any but the speaker.

Intelligent people, Achamian had found, were typically less happy. The reason for this was simple: they were better able to rationalize their delusions. The ability to stomach Truth had little to do with intelligence—nothing, in fact. The intellect was far better at arguing away truths than at finding them.

The genius of most men lay in finding reasons after their actions. The heart was ever self-serving, especially when the beliefs served involved sacrifice.

After all your years climbing around in people's heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor- odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it.