Quotes About Self-righteousness

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

I've had enough of the blowhards on cable TV and the self-righteous anger I hear from people whose only accomplishment in life is their ability to turn the dial on an AM radio.

You have been reproaching other people all your life - you have been always sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims.

You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but himself.

The self-righteous person's superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a self-righteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes self-righteous people particularly infuriating to talk to. F

Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.

No one can harm the man who does himself no wrong.

The only time anyone's admitted they were a Christian before was when they were busy telling me why they're better than me.

Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue. There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, which others defy or betray.

The church should not be an assembly of the self-righteous but an assembly of people who admit that they are not righteous apart from God's grace.

The Bible must not be read as a job description for motivated, self-disciplined, devoutly religious people to be their own heroes and saviors of their souls. It must be read as the story of guilty sinners and self-righteous hypocrites, visited by a perfect God

Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned.

We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice dispenses him who possesses from the obligation of giving. If he gives all the same, he thinks he has a right to be pleased with himself.

I did everything that might be expected from a person entirely ignorant of God's righteousness who works to build his own self-righteousness.

Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substnace of all false religion in the world.

there are a lot of self-righteous people out there. And if you try to adjust your life to please them...you're just going to go crazy and risk being as unhappy as these self-righteous kooks are.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are a lot of self righteous people out there. And if you try to adjust your life to please them - by the way you dress, your sexuality, or the ass faces you like to make - you are just going to go crazy and risk being as unhappy as these self righteous kooks are. So enjoy your life. God gave us our bodies as a gift.(Granted, to some of us it's kind of a gag gift, but that's okay too.) Wear what you want, love who you want, and have fun.

The gospel is not good news to those who pride themselves on their hard work. It is infuriating news.

I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called "salvation" and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

We Americans can be haughty. We can be delusional.

I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.