Paul S. Kemp Quotes

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

People will justify whatever for a good cause.

I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

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

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.

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

Once you start lying, you get kind of comfortable. You start believing it. Especially if you truly believe you didn't really cheat because you were doing what everybody else was doing.

People who lie, particularly those who lie really big, can't do it effectively unless they feel that there's a righteous power behind what they're doing. You're entitled to lie because the end justifies the means.

I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.

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 have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment.