Self Justification Quotes

“Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.”
― Pema Chodron

“Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Any reason could be made for self-justification.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Don’t I know by now that folk see their sins in the way they choose? There’s always a reason as to why selfishness is not really selfish and crimes are honest and waiting safely by while somefolk else is killed is really the more courageous choice.”
― Megan Campisi, Sin Eater

“Excuse tries to justify.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Fanatics clouded by self-justification.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Self-justification is unjust.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Self-justification, that was the danger-- the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all.”
― Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion

“Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.”
― Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

“She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Edward:
But I'm obsessed by the thought of my own significance.

Rielly:
Precisely. And I could make you feel important,
And you would imagine it a marvelous cure; And you would go on, doing such amount of mischief
As lay within your power -- until you came to grief.
Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm--but the harm does not interest them
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“I suppose this anger and manipulation was my pseudo-conscious method of giving the system, and all it entailed, the big fat birdie finger. What I failed to realize was that my inward disposition of fuming vindictiveness and self-justification only caused me to rob myself. I was giving myself the middle finger, not them.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose