Jessica Walter Quotes

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.

We do things for good reasons that are bad.

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Every vice has its excuse ready.

It seems to me that it's actually harder to invent excuses than it is to get a sale.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.

Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

I always have a reason for why I do something.

I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.

Mahlia... understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn't trying to change them. He wasn't trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently. She thought she'd been surviving. She thought that she'd been fighting for herself. But all she'd done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon ... not for their lives, but for their souls

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

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat.

Action is thought tempered by illusion.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?