Ayn Rand Quotes

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That's what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

Happy people rarely correct their faults; they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways.

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.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

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.

The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

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.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

Like the ostrich, head under wingWhen the roaring storm breaks,So many people take refugeUnder the soft pillowOf specious arguments.

The problem with people who say monsters don't really exist is that they're almost never saying it to the monsters." —Alice Healy

I was living a life of a lie. And I was doing a lot of things, that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly.

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Pride blinds people to the truth of what they are.

The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that other people will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.

The truth. Men will blind themselves with hot irons, rather than face it.

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.