Christopher Golden Quotes

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.

Nobody sees themselves as being an evil person or doing something for a bad reason. There's always something that justifies it to themselves.

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

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.

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

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.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Human beings will justify anything.

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

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

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.

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

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

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

There is the natural tendency that all of us are vulnerable to, to deny unpleasant realities and to look for any excuse to push them away and resolve to think about them another day long in the future.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Changing ideas is a strain not to be lightly incurred, particularly when these ideas are intimately related to one’s self-esteem ... men have elaborated an explanation for their situation in life.... Their rationales are endowed with moral qualities

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

Everyone's constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.

I'm very good at denial.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

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.