Herman Melville Quotes

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

It many times falls out that we deem ourselves much deceived in others because we first deceived ourselves.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

The system of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society…They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things.

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

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.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

We are never so easily deceived as when we imagine we are deceiving others.

There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavor to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage, as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

They hate you because you act like you're better than they are

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?

How easy it is to think well of ourselves. Until the moment is upon us, we can never be certain.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

It is as easy to deceive one's self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding out.

We can all perceive the difference between ourselves and our inferiors, but when it comes to a question of the difference between us and our superiors we fail to appreciate merits of which we have no proper conceptions.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

We all have our little illusions about our own mental abilities.