George Eliot Quotes

If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

As human beings, we create belief systems that make us feel happy with the choices we make. You'd have a lot of unhappy people regretting everything if they didn't create the belief system in which they could explain all their choices and feel like they've done the right thing.

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.

You do not convince me. You rationalize your actions and because the result is favorable you become right.

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.

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

To seek a justification for a decision already made.

I'm not sorry, it's human nature.

Changing ideas is a strain not to be lightly incurred, particularly when these ideas are intimately related to one’s self-esteem ... men have elaborated an explanation for their situation in life.... Their rationales are endowed with moral qualities

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

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

We not only want to believe that our party is superior to the opposing party, but also we want to believe that we are justified in believing this to be true.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

Human beings will justify anything.

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.

When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."

In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Keep in mind, Eragon, that no one thinks himself a villain, and few make decisions they think are wrong. A person may dislike his choice, but he will stand by it because, even in the worst circumstances, he believes that it was the best option available to him at the time.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.

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.