Quotes about self-deception

She knew it, but she did not want to know it.

Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.

“When someone asks for the ethics tape, we know they’ve already decided to invest. They just want some reassurance so they can feel good about it, too. That’s the thing you learn about values, Jones: they’re what people make up to justify what they did. Did you take business ethics in college?”

“Yes.”

“They teach you people’s behavior is guided by their values, right? That’s a load of crap. When you watch people like we do, you find out it’s the other way around. Look, I believe in what Alpha does, I really do. But do I worry about whether every little thing we do is ethical? No, because you can rationalize anything as ethical. You talk to a criminal—a tax dodger, a serial killer, a child abuser—and every one of them will justify their actions. They’ll explain to you, totally seriously, why they had to do what they did. Why they’re still good people. That’s the thing: when people talk about the importance of ethics, they never include themselves. The day anyone, anywhere, admits that they personally are unethical, I’ll start taking that whole issue seriously.”

Once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

"The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think. Everything we think must be thought with our entire being, body, and soul.

The feigning sleeper can delude others — he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.

A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all.

My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken.

Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.