Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

We all do things where we don't care about other people. And we deal with it in whatever ways we can, denial or make excuses.

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.

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.

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

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

The first sign of corruption in a society ... is that the ends justify the means.

Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.

Human beings will justify anything.

We all have excuses. We could all take all of the things that have happened to us over the course of our lives and use them as excuses for being cruel to others.

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.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!

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.

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price.

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

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.

Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

We can always find noble reasons for what we want to do.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.

We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.

Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.