86 Quotes About Rationalization

When we look at Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, we see that God's grace can survive our three-ring-circuses of compromise, rationalization and weak faith.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

What people want to hear are often the things that soothe them against what they need to hear.

If we use the ‘pen of fiction’ to edit the ‘narrative of fact’ in order to justify our choices, we will soon discover that the pen is in fact a pencil.

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.

We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.

It wasn't uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort--the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn't work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn't be laundered by good results.

We work hard to believe that our actions really don’t affect others all that much because we want the license to act without thinking all that much.

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.