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Self Deception Quotes

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Self Deception Quotes

“Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from several pieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to my own governing method, ignorance.”

PlayLiteraturePleasureLibertyKnowledgeDoubtDesignIgnoranceFlowMethodDepthVanityUncertaintyCapabilityInabilitySelf DeceptionEssaySelf Conceit
Book:The Complete Essays
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“Nowhere is the necessity for courage and good faith more evident than in the search to establish the truth about relations between people, for in this process lies the threat of annihilation. As A struggles with B to lay bare the meaning of their conduct towards each other, bravely trying to stay clear of the slide into self-deception, to confess and accept his fear and vulnerability, to acknowledge his defensive strategies, his meannesses and malignancies and desperate cravings, so B can with a single act of bad faith betray the reciprocity of this process, perhaps by 'closing down' A with some sort of objectifying label which sends him spinning like a deflating balloon into the distant, icy, sterile reaches of isolation.”

RelationshipsHonestyAuthenticityVulnerabilitySelf Deception
Book:Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
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“The truth is, we've all become plastic people — malleable, disposable, and increasingly artificial with each iteration. We accept new versions of fakeness like software updates, constantly upgrading our personas while remaining fundamentally committed to the same buggy operating system of human nature. Look at Me: A Field Guide to Self-Deception”

PhilosophyHumorTechnologyPsychologyHuman NatureIdentityAuthenticitySatireSelf DeceptionSocial Commentary
Author:Gerald P Creel Jr
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“The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. ...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”

SchoolChurchPrisonFreeRottenSelf DeceptionStateLiberalPreachersMagazineStraw MenMen Of Straw
Book:I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
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“And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.”

LiesStupidityGermanySelf DeceptionNazismMendacity
Book:Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
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“For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!”

WarLibertyRevolutionCivil WarDictatorshipSelf DeceptionHitlerRussian RevolutionStalinOrgoneEmotional PlagueLavalPetain
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened." [As quoted in: In the land of memory: Kazuo Ishiguro remembers when (Adam Dunn, cnn.com Book News, Oct. 27, 2000)]”

LyingMemorySelf DeceptionSelf Talk
Author:Kazuo Ishiguro
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“[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for—not his action, but in fact—the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one’s character—driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity.”

DutyObedienceIndividualismSelf DeceptionSelfless ServiceBlind FaithParasiteSuperegoIntellectual LazinessMilgramParasitic SuperegoBrowbeaten
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“She possessed a strong faculty for simply refusing to admit an unpleasant situation, and going quite blank where it was concerned. If, for instance, you had asked her whether, eighteen years before, she had undergone a face-lifting operation, she would have denied it, and believed the denial, and moreover would have supplied gratuitously, as a special joke, a list of people who had 'really' had their faces lifted or undergone other rejuvenating operations.”

DelusionSelf Deception
Book:Memento Mori
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“So long as self-deception is at the source of a person’s perception of things he or she cannot mature into the fullness of being human or lead a successful course through life. In Pinocchio, the physiological metaphor of hunger represents the many other passions and desires that lead children astray. Like all small children, Pinocchio is often driven by uncontrollable hunger. This gets him into much of his early trouble, while undisciplined passions and wanderlust eventually land him in the false paradise of Playand. But Pinocchio’s longing to be a real boy with a mother and father lies deeper still and is the source of his eventual salvation.”

Self Deception
Book:Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination
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