Quotes About Rationalization

There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases; it is the easiest thing of all to deceive one's self.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

An educated theologian: someone who's better at rationalizing what they're pretending to know.

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

This last argument overcame my remorse. It was all I needed, for man is a coward intent on finding an excuse for his cowardice

An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

Madness is always a wonderful excuse, don't you think? For doing terrible things to other people.

Somewhere deep down, I know I'm in the wrong. I know I'm rationalizing my actions, and worry I might even be manufacturing problems with Andy to get this result. I also know that I'm only inviting more trouble into my life. But for now, I feel good. Really good. Better than I've felt in a long, long time.

Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality.

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

I believe if we simplify the process of tariff-fixing with lesser tariff slabs and rationalise the process, it will reduce corruption, and simultaneously, it will enable supply of adequate and cheap power to the poor as well as to farmers.

Enough rationalization. They simply had what you wanted, so you took it. [My chair-- I shit on my good chair!] You shit more than just your chair. You shit the world. All you ever cared about was winning -- And you did. The last man standing on a mountain of filth [. . .] Kazumi taught forgiveness. She accepted all refugees looking for a better life. And you turned that against her. Kazumi would show mercy. I'm not Kazumi.

The dangerous part about excuses is that a lot of them make sense.

we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.

Every lie is two lies — the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it.

Everything we've got, or so we think, comes from natural talent and hard work. But with other people, we are quick to ascribe to them all kinds of Machiavellian tactics. This allows us to justify whatever we do, no matter the results.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.

Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.

You can use logic to justify just about anything, that's its power and its flaw.

Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and this is why so many of us so often resort to it—not so much to resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation to worry about them.

I am sure the grapes are sour.

Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.