Karl Jaspers Quotes

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

The easiest person to deceive is one's self.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don't want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves - along with others - about our reasons and motives.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

Trump lies when confronted with the truth, since any crack in his narcissism might spread like an Ebola of the soul, and he would deflate like one of Macy's balloons on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

Ideology is a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.