Self-delusion Quotes - page 2
I hasten to add that I had already concluded that the ‘bad apple' theory was a comforting self-delusion. Police forces throughout Australia only started to come to grips with systemic corruption when they came to the same realisation. Cultural problems are just that; they are systemic and ingrained, not the work of a few rogues.
David Morrison
The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we're significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone's enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we're not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn't "into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure's response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you're ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don't matter very much.
Malcolm Azania
I think anyone who is creative or self-aware in any way, there's like a humility to it, or I should say a humiliation to it. But there's also a self-delusion - the provisional ego, as my uncle would call it. The self-delusion is the thing that makes you go, oh you know what, all the music that I've ever loved in the world, I want to be a part of that - hey, listen to what I have to say, it's really important, it's going to matter.”
You can't apologize your way into people's hearts ... You have to go full force.
St. Vincent (musician)
I began my book about perestroika and the new thinking with the following words: "We want to be understood". After a while I felt that it was already happening. But now I would like once again to repeat those words here, from this world rostrum. Because to understand us really - to understand so as to believe us - proved to be not at all easy, owing to the immensity of the changes under way in our country. Their magnitude and character are such as to require in-depth analysis. Applying conventional wisdom to perestroika is unproductive. It is also futile and dangerous to set conditions, to say: We'll understand and believe you, as soon as you, the Soviet Union, come completely to resemble "us", the West.
No one is in a position to describe in detail what perestroika will finally produce. But it would certainly be a self-delusion to expect that perestroika will produce "a copy" of anything.
Mikhail Gorbachev
From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none - not one regime - has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.
Ronald Reagan
