Quotes about self-deception

For it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

The blind see what they want to see.

Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception.

He had pretended to himself that he had enjoyed it, and thus increased his misery.

Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.

Now it seemed that this had been a self-sustained illusion he had nourished carefully to bolster a sense of his own importance.

My own self-deception at least promised some kind of pleasure. Theirs offered nothing but terror and guilt.

But we are all victims, Captain Bastable, just as in other ways we are all aggressors. At root we are victims to the comforting lies we tell ourselves, of our willingness to shift moral responsibility onto leaders, organized religion—onto a deity or a race, if all else fails. Onto God, onto politicians, onto creatures from other planets. It is always the same impulse, to refuse responsibility. If we do not take responsibility for our own actions, ultimately we perish.

“It becomes so easy to believe what one wishes to believe,” Jhary said wearily. “So easy.”

How true it is when they say there is nothing which makes a man more furious than the discovery that he has deceived himself!