Self-deception Quotes

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. (Vladimir Lenin)
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture. View quote
David Bohm
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. View quote
George Orwell
Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge. View quote
Todd Solondz
If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness. View quote
Theodore C. Sorensen
Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism. View quote
Paul Samuelson
What would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others. View quote
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
In all of history, we have found just one cure for error-a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism. View quote
David Brin
The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe. View quote
Colin Wilson
Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred. View quote
Carl Sagan
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)
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. View quote
Thomas Szasz
Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning. View quote
Karen Horney
The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent. View quote
Stefan Zweig
First, what does truth require? It requires us to face the facts as they are, not to involve ourselves in self-deception; to refuse to think merely in slogans. If we are to work for the future of the city, let us deal with the realities as they actually are, not as they might have been, and not as we wish they were. View quote
John F. Kennedy
How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception. View quote
Gregory Maguire
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self. View quote
George Eliot
If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance. View quote
Marcus Aurelius
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
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. View quote
Alexander Cockburn
Dwelling on one side of the Chauci and Chatti, the Cherusci long cherished, unassailed, an excessive and enervating love of peace. This was more pleasant than safe, for to be peaceful is self-deception among lawless and powerful neighbours. Where the strong hand decides, moderation and justice are terms applied only to the more powerful; and so the Cherusci, ever reputed good and just, are now called cowards and fools, while in the case of the victorious Chatti success has been identified with prudence. The downfall of the Cherusci brought with it also that of the Fosi, a neighbouring tribe, which shared equally in their disasters, though they had been inferior to them in prosperous days. (Tacitus)
His profession [ diplomacy ] - offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. View quote
Lawrence Durrell
Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it? View quote
Charles Reade
Precognition or self-deception? View quote
Tanith Lee
To know oneself as well as one can; to avoid self-deception and foster no illusions; to learn what one can about the plain natural truth of things, and make one's valuations accordingly; to waste no time in speculating upon vain subtleties, upon "things which are not and work not"; - this perhaps is hardly the aim of an academic philosophy, but it is what a practical philosophy keeps steadily in view. Because the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so consistently does keep just this in view, it still remains, and for those who can take it will probably always remain, the best of handbooks to the art of living. View quote
Albert Jay Nock