Devin Druid Quotes

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

In reality, there are very few villains who view themselves as villains. They just have a certain agenda at a certain time.

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

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.

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.

No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.

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.

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

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.

Every villain has their belief system that makes perfect sense to them.

Human beings will justify anything.

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.

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.

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

The most intolerant advocate is he who is trying to convince himself.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

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

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

I always get the better when I argue alone.