Motivated Denial Quotes

The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought. ~ David Robert Grimes

Why was "nigger" bleeped out? I mean, "nigger" is a word that exists. People use it. It is part of America. It has caused a lot of pain to people and I think it is insulting to bleep it out ... it's like being in denial. If it was used like that, then it should be represented like that. Hiding it doesn't make it go away. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education. ~ Sebastian Thrun

Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway. ~ Oliver Burkeman

Never allow anyone to rain on your parade and thus cast a pall of gloom and defeat on the entire day. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to set up in the fault-finding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you permit it. Your time is too precious to be sacrificed in wasted days combating the menial forces of hate, jealously, and envy. ~ Og Mandino

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity. ~ Oscar Wilde

I feel like I was born and bred to stay self-motivated. I'm not one of those people who ho-hums and feels sorry for himself when something's bad. ~ Dane Cook

Sloth may disguise itself as "conscientious work" and meet with various forms of public approval or success. But work that is not motivated by love for the life of the community, beyond the temporal and spatial confines of one's own small life, cannot free either worker or community from profound anxiety. ~ Ellen F. Davis

On August 3, 2012, the fifteenth day of the government offensive, rebels in the city said they were desperately low on ammunition and expressed dismay that the international community had not reacted when a huge massacre could be coming. Again, Libya was the example. Gadhafi threatened to overrun Benghazi and when he tried to do it, NATO started bombing. Now in Syria, Assad was threatening to crush the opposition in Aleppo and had already started doing it, but Washington's reaction was only hand-wringing. In my conversations with rebels it was clear they were becoming increasingly disheartened and desperate. (The rebels would usually communicate with each other on Skype, blending in with the billions of people using the Internet instead of going through cell-phone towers.) The United States was apparently still skittish about sending in arms because it feared they would end up in the hands of Islamic extremists, but that, like so many unintended consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this stage the rebels were numerous, strong, motivated, and moderate and I made that clear in my reports on the air. ~ Richard Engel

If a student takes a Stanford computer class and a Princeton business class, it shows they are motivated and have skills. We know it has helped employees get better jobs. ~ Daphne Koller

When pondering who I am, I write the fiction that I want directly over the facts that I hate. However, what I've discovered is that fiction is written in pencil while facts are in pen. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I consider myself the head coach whose job is to keep this winning team intact. I keep everybody focused and motivated. ~ Monte Lipman

Food won't go down when you know your mother didn't want you, never liked to feed you, always hated you in her rooms. You were wrong to clutch and swallow and move your mouth. You must not be flushed, layered in fat or ripe from meat or she will despise your sight. Your skeleton cries, "I make no demands, I am ashamed of my needs, I am unworthy. I'm aware of those more deserving, those with prior and urgent claims to food." Skeleton says, "My safety is in slightness, my pride is denial. My victory is no gluttony, no guilt. ~ Jenny Holzer

In America, burial means an embalmed body in a heavy-duty casket with a vault built over it, so that the ground doesn't settle. That body is encased in many layers of denial. ~ Caitlin Doughty

We are all motivated far more than we care to admit by characteristics inherited from our ancestors which individual experiences of childhood can modify, repress, or enhance, but cannot erase. ~ Agnes Meyer Driscoll

I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was. ~ Alexandra Fuller

Denial, anger, acceptance ~ Gayle Forman

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial. ~ George Monbiot

The central objective in decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them. ~ Chinweizu Ibekwe

Yes, when you are sharpened with the true information, you will be motivated to make impacts. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

There are too many over-fed, under-motivated Christians hiding behind the excuse that God has not spoken to them. They are waiting to hear voices or see dreams - all the while living to make money, to provide for their future, to dress well and have fun. ~ Floyd McClung

One main problem with raising awareness of LGBT abuse is the denial. The term "domestic violence" is perceived as something akin to alcoholism, ("I don't sit on a park bench drinking") and people do not see that they are perpetrating or are a victim of DV because they have a set idea about what it is. ~ Kim Kardashian

If you been feeling or acting crazy, think about it perhaps you are. ~ Victoria Addino

We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself. ~ Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

Science adjusts its views based on what's observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved. ~ Tim Minchin

Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial. ~ David Stafford

The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars. ~ Arthur Miller

Often truths we are not ready for can cause trauma and pain and push one deeper into denial. It can also make one more aggressive to defend the denial and seek others like yourself to defend this shared denial as well. ~ L.B. Ó Ceallaigh

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long. ~ Edward W. Said

You can always tell who a true trailblazer is by the friends and family that surround them. True trailblazers are motivated not by glory, but for love. ~ Angela Cervantes

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all? ~ Joseph Conrad

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace. ~ Timothy Keller

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race. ~ Clarence Thomas

- Hitler said that people are not motivated by, "sound reasoning but by emotions and feelings." He must have been right for it's the only thing that explains how stupid people can be. However I have been one of those people. Admit

~ Charles Gilbert

...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, 'I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;' to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary, - this is the victory that overcometh the world.

To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream;

to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose; - these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.

'I am weak,' says the true soul, 'but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep! ~ George MacDonald

The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it's so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial. How can anything be wrong with loving God and giving your life for good works and service to mankind? ~ John Bradshaw

One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice. ~ George E.P. Box

(Sometimes it seems that haters are just fans who are in denial.) ~ Steve Maraboli

And the fear of not being is born in that space. But in meditation, when this is understood, the mind can enter into a dimension of space where action is inaction. We do not know what love is, for in the space made by thought around itself as the me, love is the conflict of the me and the not-me. This conflict, this torture, is not love. Thought is the very denial of love, and it cannot enter into that space where the me is not. In that space is the benediction which man seeks and cannot find. He seeks it within the frontiers of thought, and thought destroys the ecstasy of this benediction. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Parents are in denial a lot of the time - everybody knows what they did as a teenager, but somehow, when they grow up, it all disappears. ~ Nikki Reed

Was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial? ~ Ian McEwan

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) ~ Ross Cheit