Quotes About Self-defeating

our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

Today, to allege corruption seems to be the pastime of most people. All kinds of allegations are leveled. I think it is self-defeating.

Sitting with a bunch of adults and arguing about what's going to be most effective for kids is just sort of self-defeating.

Jim' persona had everything to do with the principle of Dionysus, the dark, self-defeating eroticism.

Fear is the single most self-defeating emotion in our lives.

Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.

This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.

If depression, loneliness, and social anxiety maintain themselves through a vicious circle of negative experiences, negative thinking, and self-defeating behavior, it should be possible to break the circle at any of several points—by changing the environment, by training the person to behave more constructively, or by reversing negative thinking. And it is. Several therapy methods help free people from depression's vicious circle.

Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.

Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish.

Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why conquests eventually defeat themselves.

Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.

From an evolutionary perspective, parenting isn't a good model for parents and children. Caring for children, nurturing them and investing in them, is absolutely critical for human thriving. Teaching children implicitly and explicitly is certainly important. But, from the point of view of evolution, trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating.

As buoyancy is not contrary to other characteristics of leadership, including decisiveness, accountability and performance standards, I don't ever think it can be self-defeating.

Show them how their behavior is self-defeating. To create self-motivation for change, you have to show them how something important to them is lost because of their behavior.

I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.

to be of greater use, the rules need to be remolded so that they are more precise and accurate, less egocentric, and more elastic . When rules are discovered to be false, self-defeating, or unworkable, they have to be dropped from the repertoire.

So why did Rockefeller stick to his self-defeating silence?

This is this thing I harp on: Sometimes acting can be a self-defeating psychological enterprise if we feel like we're desperate, if we feel like we're beggars at the door, praying that someone will take pity on us and give us a job. It would be so much better to feel like we're tradesmen.

It's a funny thing about those of us who have ADHD. We want what others avoid. We like problems. We need the difficult. That's because easy is boring. We need the stimulation of intense challenge. But as we've said, a challenge undertaken just for the sake of a challenge can be counterproductive at best, self-defeating at worst.

I witnessed first-hand the self-defeating results of putting yourself under so much pressure to perform.