Quotes About Self-defeating

Making excuses for chronic promise-breakers is invariably self-defeating.

Since self-defeating behavior goes back to the childhood experience of being alone and defenseless, it is easier to overcome it in adulthood if you get support from other people. The actual role your helpers play doesn't matter. They can assist you directly, provide moral support or agree to hold you accountable for the changes you vow to make. What's important is that you know you're not alone. This will strengthen your confidence and determination.

Perfectionism is burdensome and self-defeating. Accepting imperfection in yourself frees you (and perhaps your child) from the burden of unrealistic expectations. No parent is perfect, and your best is good enough. If you have made a mistake, in almost all cases it can be corrected.

It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.

Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices because one cannot own anything permanently; we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfillment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.

The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.

therapists seem to be seeing more and more people at all socioeconomic levels who are deeply in debt—will be glad to take advantage of a therapist's willingness to underwrite their self-defeating habits by reducing the fee or "carrying" them for a while. Not only is it not in the therapist's interest to promote this accommodation, it is not in the client's interest, either.

A reductionistic worldview leads to a lower view of humanity—and thus of the human mind. It reduces human reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way any worldview can argue its own case is by using reason. By discrediting reason, it undermines its own case. It is self-defeating.

When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: "I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change [...]

For some moviegoers, movies probably contribute to that self-defeating romanticizing of expectations which makes life a series of disappointments. They watch the same movies over and over on television, as if they were constantly returning to the scene of the crime—the life they were so busy dreaming about that they never lived it.