Quotes About Rationalization

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

At the time of action, our decision is based on a set of assumptions. The assumptions may be wrong. Leaders have to constantly deal with uncertainty, give hope to the people even when nothing is clear. Decisions become good or bad in hindsight. We would like to believe that a decision is rational. More often than not, decisions are rationalized.

I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life...procrastinating and rationalizing.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

The thinner the excuse, the fatter the reason for it.

Neuroscientists say they can predict an action our mind has decided to take moments before our conscious mind has even decided what we think we're going to do. The function of consciousness, they argue, isn't to make decisions, but to rationalize them after the fact.

It's as if you've already crossed over; the devil has won your soul. Additional stains don't matter. And yet this wasn't true for me. The idea of fudging my time and squeezing out more money for the work I had done hadn't even occurred to me. Did that mean I had successfully rationalized my adultery, that somehow what I was doing was not immoral and therefore I still had a lily-white soul to protect?

People like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.

Good excuses rarely collect dust. We use them, and use them, and use them.

Do you know why people are prone to make such foolish moral decisions? Because something always whispers to us that our situations are unique: Nobody has ever felt this way before.

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.

If there's an area in your life where you tell yourself, "I know this is wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway, and probably repeat it," Solomon would answer, "In that area of your life, you're a fool." And

A part of my job, when I'm playing a character and approaching a role, is to rationalize and to not judge whatsoever.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

You pick women who aren't good enough, and then you rationalize how they treat you rather than just telling them they aren't good enough for you.

perhaps he had so thoroughly rationalized his own behavior that he saw himself in the same glowing, virtuous light as his son did.

In the end, we can only explain how he rationalized his behavior to himself and others; given the absence of revelatory letters or diaries, we can say little about the unconscious drives that led him to do this or the mental strains it might have caused.

Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat at the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth.

People will believe anything it it means they can go on with their lives and not have to think too hard about it.

If men had been forbidden to make porridge of camel's dung, they would have done it, saying that they would not have been forbidden to do it unless there had been some good in it.

He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

What's the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn't the rationalization of your feelings? If you've never had a religious experience, it's folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can't eat them without being sick.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization—the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in ther interests of the Party or the State.