Rationalisation Quotes

Viciousness is part of the world we live in, some of us choose to ignore it with the rationalisation of wanting only positivity to flow our way. How selfish we have become! That the pain of others has become a hindrance to the fulfilment of our positive selves. ~ Aysha Taryam

I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever
any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is "good" or "bad"
every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually "I like this book" or "I don't like it" and what follows is a rationalisation. ~ George Orwell

What is worse than indifference is when people's nationalism allows for the conscious rationalisation of brutality as part of a political balance sheet. It is but a grave oversight when people shift their responsibility towards moral values for the duty to obey. ~ Aysha Taryam

On a basic level- everything we say- essentially anything that comes out of our mouths is a rationalisation in some form or another ~ Mohadesa Najumi

... everyone knew that sin was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalisation, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. ~ Joseph Heller

I'm bad at rationalisation - very bad. ~ Erin O'Connor

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning. ~ Christopher Hitchens

No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The same thing is happening with the State. Call to mind what the State was at the end of the XVIIIth Century in all European nations. Quite a small affair! Early capitalism and its industrial organisation, in which the new, rationalised technique triumphs for the first time, had brought about a commencement of increase in society. A new social class appeared, greater in numbers and power than the pre-existing: the middle class. This astute middle class possessed one thing, above and before all: talent, practical talent. It knew how to organise and discipline, how to give continuity and consistency to its efforts. In the midst of it, as in an ocean, the "ship of State" sailed its hazardous course. The ship of State is a metaphor re-invented by the bourgeoisie, which felt itself oceanic, omnipotent, pregnant with storms. That ship was, as we said, a very small affair: it had hardly any soldiers, bureaucrats, or money. It had been built in the Middle Ages by a class of men very different from the bourgeois - the nobles, a class admirable for their courage, their gifts of leadership, their sense of responsibility. Without them the nations of Europe would not now be in existence. But with all those virtues of the heart, the nobles were, and always have been, lacking in virtues of the head. Of limited intelligence, sentimental, instinctive, intuitive - in a word, "irrational." Hence they were unable to develop any technique, a thing which demands rationalisation. They did not ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Most individual approaches to love, however unexpected, possess a logic of their own; for only by attempting to find some rationalisation of love in the mind can its burdens easily be borne. Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives. ~ Anthony Powell