Self Deception Quotes - Page 5

• Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

  Moss Hart

  Self, Deception, Tools

  moss hart (1959). “act one”

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• The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.

  Eric Hoffer

  Hate, Spring, Sacrifice

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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• The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one's self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgment of the existence of hidden emotions, motives and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.

  Bhikkhu Analayo

  Honesty, Self Esteem, Deception

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• Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

  Philip Warren Anderson

  Nature, Attitude, Science

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• A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

  Alexander Cockburn

  War, Self, Deception

  New Statesman and Society (Magazine), February 8, 1991.

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• The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.

  Sam Harris

  Thinking, Self, People

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• To benefit by others' killing and to delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religions and nonviolent is sheer self-deception.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Self, Deception, Religion

  Mahatma Gandhi (1946). “Daridra-Narayana: Edited & Published by Anand T. Hingorani”

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• If... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.

  Robert Trivers

  Strong, Communication, Animal

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• When virtuous mental attitudes, like mindfulness, respect, and compassion, are invoked to justify nonvirtuous acts like hunting, fishing, and eating animal products, the mental attitudes are insincere. They are self-deceptions that we create to justify habits that in our hearts we know are wrong, but to which we have become attached.

  Norm Phelps

  Buddhist, Attitude, Heart

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• The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

  Colin Wilson

  Believe, Passion, Self

  Colin Wilson (2011). “Afterlife: An Investigation”, p.307, Doubleday

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• When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

  Darin Strauss

  Self, Deception, Dying

  Darin Strauss (2001). “Chang and Eng”, p.13, Penguin

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• You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Self, Deception, Trying

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• It is best, if possible, to deceive no one; for he that ... begins by deceiving others, will end ... by deceiving himself.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Deceiving Others, Deception, Ends

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• Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

  Thomas Szasz

  Confused, Men, Race

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 67), March 1, 1990.

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• It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

  Jane Addams

  Believe, Self, Promise

  Jane Addams (2010). “The Selected Papers of Jane Addams: Vol. 2: Venturing into Usefulness”, p.601, University of Illinois Press

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• I just can't believe that there won't come a day when people won't be fed-up with being overfed. That they won't get fed-up with the self-deception that all this fantastic food is the whole point of life.

  Gudrun Ensslin

  Believe, Self, People

  "Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr'actes in History". Book by Siegfried Zielinski, 1999.

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• The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.

  Hal Rothman

  Las Vegas, Self, Cities

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• It is probably true that almost all atheists stand for the values of reason and freethought. I will attempt to put these values in more substantial terms. There is the belief that inquiry and doubt are essential checks against deception, self deception, and error. There is the belief that logic and the scientific method is the only way the world can arrive at an agreement on the truth about anything.

  Richard Carrier

  Atheist, Errors, Self

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• An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.

  Karl Jaspers

  Self, Ideas, Deception

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• Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support... In acts of supreme self-deception, at various times and in various places he has been willing to profess belief in the most incredible myths because of what they have promised him.

  Paul Kurtz

  Religious, Self, Support

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• I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

  Errol Morris

  Self, People, Deception

  Source: collider.com

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• self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation).

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Sacrifice, Self, Deception

  Sarah Ban Breathnach (2009). “Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self”, p.98, Hachette UK

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• Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary -- and are entirely replaceable-- must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception, whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and that its destruction is very painful.

  Charles le Gai Eaton

  Spiritual, Real, Rain

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• If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

  Germaine Greer

  Real, Love Is, Self

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Deception, Lost, Torture

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