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Rationalization Quotes

Browse 104 quotes about Rationalization.

Rationalization Quotes

“But what if current misery hindsightfully selects and reconstructs memories of childhood to be consistent with a miserable state today? Peter Lewinsohn and Michael Rosenbaum (1987) set out to answer this question with a rare prospective study of over a thousand citizen volunteers. [...] The results were consistent with the hypothesis that recollection of one’s parents as rejecting and unloving is strongly influenced by current moods; negative recollections were not a stable characteristic of depression-prone people. [...] This study of depression is important in that it casts doubt on the degree to which adult problems are caused by childhood ones. Given a biasing effect of mood on memory, people who are distressed as adults tend to remember distressing incidents in their childhood. And, if a person also believes that current problems have their roots in early life (perhaps because their therapist told them so), this view itself may serve as an organizing principle to produce even greater distortion of recall (remember the Conway & Ross [1984] study).”

PsychologyDepressionRationalizationFalse MemoriesCognitive BiasesCognitive Distortions
Book:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
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“I’ve earned the right to steal a little makeup. Scientists have confirmed that humanity is highly suggestible. If I intend to escape the jaws of consumerism, I have some hard choices ahead. I won’t say that the Devil is behind this, but Gretchen goes to Catholic school, she says the Devil can show up anywhere, and we wouldn’t even recognize him. Last week Gretchen told me, watch carefully to see how one thing connects to another.”

CrimeStealingComing Of AgeTeensExcusesTheftRationalizationShopliftingZonked
Book:Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe
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“So tell me, giant philosopher, why we're not dukes," the Gray Mouser demanded, unrolling a forefinger from the fist on his knee so that it pointed across the brazier at Fafhrd. "Or emperors, for that matter, or demigods." "We are not dukes because we're no man's man," Fafhrd replied smugly, settling his shoulders against the stone horse-trough. "Even a duke must butter up a king, and demigods the gods. We butter no one. We go our own way, choosing our own adventure—and our own follies! Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude." "There speaks the hound turned out by his last master and not yet found new boots to slaver on," the Mouser retorted with comradely sardonic impudence. "Look you, you noble liar, we've labored for a dozen lords and kings and merchants fat. You've served Movarl across the Inner Sea. I've served the bandit Harsel. We've both served this Glipkerio, whose girl is tied to Ilthmar this same night." "Those are exception," Fafhrd protested grandly. "And even when we serve, we make the rules. We bow to no man's ultimate command, dance to no wizard's drumming, join no mob, hark to no wildering hate-call. When we draw sword, it's for ourselves alone.”

ServitudeRationalization1963FafhrdGray MouserThe Cloud Of Hate
Book:Swords in the Mist
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“Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.”

HealingAbuseMental HealthAddictionMental IllnessDenialSurvivorChild AbuseDreadSubconsciousPtsdAlcoholismInsomniaAvoidanceDissociationAbuse SurvivorsNightmaresSurvivorsIncestHealing InsightsFragmentedTraumatic ExperiencesChildhood AbuseConscious AwarenessRationalizationMental DisorderTraumatizedPanic AttacksDissociative DisorderAlcohol AddictionSelf ProtectionChild RapeDissociative AmnesiaHealing From AbuseMinimizingFlashbackAbusive ParentsHealing AbuseTrauma MemoryDefense MechanismFlashbacksParental AbuseEffects Of Child AbuseMinimizationDenial Of AbuseTrauma MemoriesDenial Of Child AbuseTraumatic MemoriesAbusive ParentIntrusiveSadistic AbuseDenial Of IncestIncestuousPsychological DefenceBad ChildhoodIrrational FearsAbusive ChildhoodIntrusionsMinimizing IssuesDissociated AmnesiaCompulsionsCompulsive EatingFear Of TruthBody MemoriesCompulsive BehaviorCompulsive OvereatingSeemingly Inexplicable BehaviorSex Addition
Book:The Couple Who Became Each Other: Stories of Healing and Transformation from a Leading Hypnotherapist
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“The human brain can protect us from seeing and feeling what it believes may be too uncomfortable for us to tolerate. It can lead us to deny, defend, minimize, or rationalize away something that doesn’t fit our worldview.”

DenialUnbearableWorldviewRationalizeRationalizationMinimizationDenial Of AbuseDefensesPsychological Defenses
Book:The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
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“Our emotions hold more power over us than blade or poison alike. To embrace freely the entire spectrum of our emotions is to allow a multitude of Trojan horses containing hidden emotional poisons to circumvent the walls of rationalization – walls we need to protect our trust, confidence, understanding, and self-control.”

UnderstandingPowerTrustConfidenceEmotionsProtectionPoisonSelf ControlSpectrumSwordWallsRationalizationTrojan HorseBlade
Book:Rise of the Morningstar
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“The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.”

EfficiencyRationalizationDehumanizationProductionCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.”

PoliticsCapitalismLibertarianismNeoliberalismGovernment ProgramsRationalizationMarket
Book:The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
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“You mean when you called Khalil a drug dealer?" He nods. "Even if he was, I knew that boy. Watched him grow up with you. He was more than any bad decision he made," he says. "I hate that I let myself fall into that mind-set of trying to rationalize his death. And at the end of the day, you don't kill someone for opening a car door. If you do, you shouldn't be a cop.”

DeathPoliceDrugsAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRationalizationDrug Dealers
Book:The Hate U Give
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“When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely: 1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws 2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues 3. Admire themselves for living up to it Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.”

HappinessHuman NatureSelf LoveEgoRationalizationThe Secret Of Happiness
Book:The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing
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“I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects—the ‘devil theory.’ [...] You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. [...] You think banders are scoundrels. They are not. Nor are company officials, nor patrons, nor the governing classes back on earth. Men are constrained by necessity and build up rationalizations to account for their acts.”

StupidityRationalizationNecessityVillainyHanlon RazorDevil Fallacy
Book:Logic of Empire
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“At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman's wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools in working my way through our social obligations. I believed that playing the roles of wife and mother were the least I could do to help support Tom's career. During the day, I was a puzzle with innumerable pieces. One piece made my family a nourishing breakfast. Another piece ferried the kids to school and to soccer practice. A third piece managed to trip to the grocery store. There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer. I was a circus performer traversing the tightwire, and I could fall off into a vortex devoid of reality at any moment. There was, and had been for a very long time, an intense sense of despair. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better. I lived in an emotional black hole. p20-21, talking about dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder).”

RealitySocialActingEmotionPiecesDespairDepressionPerfectionMental HealthMental IllnessDenialHopelessPretendingHopelessnessCircusDissociative Identity DisorderMultiple Personality DisorderBlack HoleSocial AnxietyRationalizationPuzzleMpdDidPartsFunctioning
Book:Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse
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