Chuck Klosterman Quotes

So whatever decision you make, you're going to be able to find stories or signs to say 'I did the right thing,' because we have to believe we did the right thing in order to survive.

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.

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.

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

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

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

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

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.

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."

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.

Everybody always feels that they're right even if they're wrong and that's what a whole actor's career is built around rationalizing your way into whatever character you're playing.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

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.

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.

any compulsion tries to justify itself.

No matter what it is, I think people want the answer they want, they don't want the truth.

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.

People try to make sense of things, and if they don’t know the answers, they make them up,because for some, a wrong answer is better than none.

Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

Most Christians with bitterness have a need to justify their sin. They usually do so with virtuous names for the sin like discernment, wisdom, etc. They attract people with complaints as it confirms their “discernment.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

The more bad choices you make, the less bad your choices seem.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old, it is easier still.

It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.