Sydney J. Harris Quotes

An excuse is sometimes more ugly than guilt.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

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.

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.

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.

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.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you couldn't say you were better than the other person because you knew you had a secret. You knew you had cheated.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Yes, I know I've played these women, but I'm not really conniving at all.

Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway.

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.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

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

If the best man's faults were written on his forehead, he would draw his hat over his eyes.

The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt.

What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.

Little white lies are told by humans all the time. Indeed, lying is often how we get through each day in a happy little bubble. We spend time and energy rationalizing our own behaviors, beliefs and decision-making processes.

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.

Many, many people exaggerate their accomplishments, blame their failures on others, and misrepresent reality in order to make themselves look better. This behavior is ubiquitous—sometimes intentional, more often subconscious. In ordinary life, we tolerate it, mutely or not, hoping that we are not as bad as the person whose lies we are listening to.

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.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.