Quotes About Self-righteousness

For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them.

Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God's satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.

The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They

he abhorred these self-righteous, self-appointed arbiters of morality. He called them "the Anvil Chorus," pointing out that every new development in history had drawn the fear and suspicion of people like them.

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.

That debauchery was not a good thing in a married man did not even occur to him [Tsar Nicholas I], and he would have been very surprised if anyone had condemned him for it. But, even though he was convinced that he had acted as he ought, he was left with some sort of unpleasant aftertaste, and, to stifle that feeling, he began thinking about something that always soothed him: about what a great man he was.

Many guys seem to think that his thoughts and feelings are always right and always the best option. I think I am the same kind of guy.

Every villain is a hero in his own mind.

Every villain is a hero in their own mind.

It was clear Jackson was the sort of young man who considers himself rather smarter than he is, and who is naturally cruel but thinks himself a decent fellow.

It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others ad fight for your rights...

Self-righteousness is an especially heady condition that all of us have experienced at one time or another. Those who are honest will admit there is something sickly-sweet and alluring about knowing you are right, while others are terribly wrong.

The variety of inventive ideas—and ideologies—that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they're stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.

Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as—and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be—lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to even go on living, before they were 'saved.' And

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way—and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?   As

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way – and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dulness takes the lead in the world?

The devil a puritan that he is, or anything, constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass that cons state without book and utters it by great swathes; the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him – and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

When we do not trust him wholeheartedly, we defraud God of his honor.[107] While Luther sees self-righteousness as a cause of doubt, Calvin sees it as a defrauding of God. When men trust their own zeal, wisdom, and toil, they usurp God's exclusive right to glory for the well being of his people.

Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.

A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.

We were greeted by the minister whose inclusive, non-judgemental smile was no more than a whisker away from a smirk. Have I made it clear? I don't like belief systems and even less like those that peddle self-righteousness. I have no doubt the minister was a sincere man, but I am not as impressed by the idea of sincerity as the sincere seem to be.