John Galt Quotes

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

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.'

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.

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.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

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

The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

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.

When you're a liar, a person of low moral fortitude, really any explanation you need to be true can be true. Especially if you're smart enough. You can figure out a way to justify anything.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

People deny things that are true all the time.

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.

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.

The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

A form of self-delusion.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

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.