Rationalization is foreplay with one’s conscience.

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

I think the world honestly would be a much healthier place if instead of trying to find rationalizations for our bad behavior we would just say, “I was an asshole. Sure, there were reasons behind...

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.

The ego is a mean mechanism which mobilizes the absolute strongest rationalization traps in order to preserve itself.

If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory...

The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good...

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...

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead...

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn’t be prepared to make for other people.

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one’s most reassuring self-deceptions!

There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called...

Thomas was like a drug, so smooth and overwhelming that he took one up a level in their emotions just by watching him and listening to him. He was a natural entertainer, filled with talent...

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...

These prin­ciples laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to...

An educated theologian: someone who’s better at rationalizing what they’re pretending to know.

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.

Lifting your eyes from the things of this world is an activity that must begin WHERE YOU ARE.

Tolstoy said, ‘The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.’ Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our...

Mediocrity is ‘purpose’ left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.

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

He had a clear conscience. Never used it.

To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and...

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

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

Your theology won’t always work toward your obedience, because your use of theology is dictated by the condition of your heart. If your heart is not submitting to the plan of God, you will actually...