Wellington Mara Quotes

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

Human beings will justify anything.

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

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

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

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

Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error.

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

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

Excuses sound best to the person that's making 'em up!

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

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

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

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.

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

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

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

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