Sydney J. Harris Quotes

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.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

What amazes me is how far some people will go to justify their behavior to themselves, just to preserve that self-perception.

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

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

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

Once you start lying, you get kind of comfortable. You start believing it. Especially if you truly believe you didn't really cheat because you were doing what everybody else was doing.

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

I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

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.

People go down bad paths and they make bad decisions, but it's always justified in their head.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

Everyone's constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.

Nobody sees themselves as being an evil person or doing something for a bad reason. There's always something that justifies it to themselves.

Human beings will justify anything.

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.

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

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.

Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.

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.