86 Quotes About Rationalization

Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

Rationalization is foreplay with one's conscience.

Darkness should never be an excuse to quit, for with God, darkness is the exact stuff that light was built for.

I paved the path to the very place I don’t want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn’t put me any place else.

At one time or another someone said to us, ‘What were you thinking?’ And often it’s not that we weren’t thinking. Rather, it was that we were thinking that thinking would get in the way of what we wanted, so we were thinking that it would be better not to think. And I think that all of that is thinking.

Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.

With no one to confide in, she'd held the argument inside her own head and naturally found a way to dissolve facts into concepts and concepts into explanations that in the end explained nothing at all.