Quotes About Rationalization

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be.

You could not even guess at the things that I have done. Awful, evil, obscene. The telling of them alone would make you puke. They nag at me from time to time, but I tell myself I had good reasons. The years pass, the unimaginable becomes everyday, the hideous becomes tedious, the unbearable becomes routine. I push it all into the dark corners of my mind, and it's incredible, the room back there. Amazing, what one can live with.

The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.

When the lunatic is met with ideas incompatible with his delusion he distorts facts by rationalization to preserve the inner consistency of his delusions.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world.

smart people don't do stupid things for no reason, so one must locate why they are doing something that looks stupid from our point of view but may make sense from their point of view.

Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves.

if you surrounded murder with enough forms and procedures, if you could convince yourself that it was an absolute necessity, then ultimately it would not be murder at all.

I salve my own conscience. I give him the surcease of religion before betraying him. Thus may I say to myself that he has gone where I cannot go.

O que é a lei? Controle? A lei filtra o caos e o que passa por ela? A serenidade? A lei: nosso ideal mais elevado e nossa natureza mais baixa. Não observe a lei muito de perto. Se o fizer, encontrará as interpretações racionalizadas, o casuísmo legal, os precedentes da conveniência. Encontrará a serenidade, que é só mais um sinônimo de morte.

The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values.

As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

How staunchly people rationalized the things they had, even (especially) if they didn't choose them.

We think we are reasonable and rational most of the time. But what hypnotists have long known, and scientists have in recent years confirmed, is that our decisions are often made without appeal to the rational parts of our brains. We literally make our decisions first and then create elaborate rationalizations for them after the fact.

what hypnotists have long known, and scientists have in recent years confirmed, is that our decisions are often made without appeal to the rational parts of our brains. We literally make our decisions first and then create elaborate rationalizations for them after the fact.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

See El Dorado. Take El Dorado. Find another El Dorado. The envy of others is a self-replenishing feast. A rationalization a day keeps your conscience at bay. Never bang your head against a wall. Bang someone else's. Don't break the law. Break the Law. Losers make hurdles. Winners hurdle them.

A rationalization a day keeps your conscience at bay.

I say 'told myself' because—and this became clearer to me later, I didn't know this back then, I wasn't wise to it—to put it bluntly, we never really know why we do what we do. The part of our brains tasked with generating reasons doesn't care about truth… only plausibility.

when I betray myself, others' faults become immediately inflated in my heart and mind. I begin to 'horribilize' others. That is, I begin to make them out to be worse than they really are. And I do this because the worse they are, the more justified I feel.

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.

An instinct is weakened when it rationalises itself: for by rationalising itself it weakens itself.