Rationalize Quotes

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Food is art, I believe. If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way.

An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.

You can minimize your sin. Rationalize your sin. Justify your sin.

It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

The role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.

I began to rationalize marrying Will [William Houston Price]. 'He comes from a good family. A girl could do worse.' (As it turned out, I couldn't, but I didn't know that yet.)

The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception.

Human beings, when they encounter that which can't be understood, either run away from it, run towards it blindly, or just rationalize it out of existence.

We point to our unhappy circumstances to rationalize our negative feelings. This is the easy way out. It takes, after all, very little effort to feel victimized.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.

In the 17 years since I graduated from this great College of Law, I have seen that, for many of us, it becomes increasingly easy to rationalize our actions in the name of expediency when facing difficult decisions-to choose a path where the ends justify the means. I want to ask you to challenge Machiavelli's philosophy. I want to humbly suggest that you be the guardians of a more complicated truth: that the means are as important-and sometimes even more important-than the ends.

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.

The creature comforts we tend to rationalize as "business expenses I can write off."

At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.

You do not convince me. You rationalize your actions and because the result is favorable you become right.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Too often we bask in our comfortable complacency and rationalize that the ravages of war, economic disaster, famine, and earth quake cannot happen here. Those who believe this are either not acquainted with the revelations of the Lord, or they do not believe them. Those who smugly think these calamities will not happen, that they will somehow be set aside because of the righteousness of the Saints, are deceived and will rue the day they harbored such a delusion.

I can't rationalize the brilliance and knowledge that you have about the intricacies of the market with the crazy bullshit I see you do each night.

Your brand image is primarily an emotional construct. Emotion is probably always more powerful in swaying people than reason, but people like to be able to rationalize their choices.

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

Just as we're always told that schoolyard bullies are actually deeply insecure, liberals rationalize their own ferocious behavior by claiming to have been wounded somehow. What about the little guy our poor, insecure bully is beating the living daylights out of? How's his self-esteem coming along? That is the essence of liberals: They viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they are the victims.

I rationalize out, well, how much help could you really be, you know? And maybe if people saw this, they'd realize the brutality of war and figure out there's got to be some better way than killing human beings who are just trying to farm a field.

Who are we to create a heaven and hell for ourselves, excluding animals and plants in the bargain, just because we have the power to rationalize?

The assurance of His total forgiveness of our sins through the blood of Christ means we don't have to play defensive games anymore. We don't have to rationalize and excuse our sins. We can call sin exactly what it is, regardless of how ugly and shameful it may be, because we know that Jesus bore that sin in His body on the cross.

You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies--misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.

If we rationalize our problems when He points them out, we will spend less and less time meditating because we won't want to face God in that area of our lives.

Dogs don't rationalize. They don't hold anything against a person. They don't see the outside of a human but the inside of a human.

When you look at the Justice Department's report talking about the Ferguson Police Department's rampant pattern of discrimination and its excessive use of force against African-American citizens, it's hard to try to rationalize how this cesspool of racism doesn't spill over onto the individual officers.

Honestly admitting what you lost and not trying to rationalize it or push it off is an important step in self-assessment and mindfulness.

Don Keough's (CEO Coca-Cola) 11 Rules on "HOW TO LOSE": 1. Stop taking risks 2. Be content 3. Never deviate from what the founder did 4. Be inflexible 5. Rely totally on research and experts 6. Concentrate on competitors instead of your customers 7. Put yourself - not the customer - first 8. Solve administrative concerns first 9. Let others do your thinking for example, headquarters 10. Rely on T-G-E: "That's Good Enough" and T-N-M-J: "That's Not My Job!" 11. Rationalize slow growth

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs.

I'm not saying people should go out and start killing," the California-based Vlasak says. But he's not saying activists shouldn't kill either, even though he's a doctor, devoted to mending people. "There's a lot of violence used against animals" Vlasak rationalizes. And some of those responsible won't stop, he says, "until they are forced to stop.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

By and large, the world wants to move away from the nuclear era. The question is how fast and how far. In a world of sovereign nation-states, I can't rationalize any number above zero. If it's more than zero, you have to acknowledge every nation has the right to have them.

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.