Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

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

I think, to me, I was always taught you never approach any character as a villain. Every human being on earth really believes that they're doing the best thing. We all have our rationalizations.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

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

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

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.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

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

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.

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

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

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.

It's very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It's not just because they are evil, but because that's how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It's always interesting figuring out how that happens.

Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.

Little white lies are told by humans all the time. Indeed, lying is often how we get through each day in a happy little bubble. We spend time and energy rationalizing our own behaviors, beliefs and decision-making processes.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Many, many people exaggerate their accomplishments, blame their failures on others, and misrepresent reality in order to make themselves look better. This behavior is ubiquitous—sometimes intentional, more often subconscious. In ordinary life, we tolerate it, mutely or not, hoping that we are not as bad as the person whose lies we are listening to.

With any villain, you have to see things from their point of view and understand that they think what they're doing will make the world a better place.