Joseph Conrad Quotes

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them?

Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister; should they let the human race die out?

Men who have flattered themselves into this opinion of their own abilities, look down on all who waste their lives over books, as a race of inferior beings condemned by nature to perpetual pupilage, and fruitlessly endeavouring to remedy their barrenness by incessant cultivation, or succour their feebleness by subsidiary strength. They presume that none would be more industrious than they, if they were not more sensible of deficiences; and readily conclude, that he who places no confidence in his own powers owes his modesty only to his weakness.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Your excuses are nothing more than the lies your fears have sold you.

Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.

A false path must be tensely and angrily defended by those it has deceived.

Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.

Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.

Most people like to live in illusions.

A man’s greatest treasures are his illusions - Durzo Blint

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'

I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.

There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought, and he therefore cannot carry his own reflection to any logical conclusion.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.