Jodi Picoult Quotes

No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.

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 we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

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.

People will justify whatever for a good cause.

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.

A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one and the real one.

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

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

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

Every lie has 2 parts - the lie we tell others and the one we tell ourselves to justify it.

It's hard to convince people that you're killing them for their own good.

You undergo too strict a paradox, Striving to make an ugly deed look fair.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces. (a servant in the House of Black and White)

he was trying to convince himself that he wasn't guilty.

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

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.

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.

As long as the wrong feels right - it's like I'm in flight.

It seems to me that it's actually harder to invent excuses than it is to get a sale.

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