rationalization

I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we__e been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We__e no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It__ simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we__e been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

There is no law against delaying action to weigh it in thought.

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day_ doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents_ it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of __ndependents_ and __oderates_ may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.

We work hard to believe that our actions really don__ affect others all that much because we want the license to act without thinking all that much.

With all the god-awful suffering in this war, I suppose somebody ought to be enjoying it.

To be alone with myself in the space of silence is horrifying, for I know with the utmost certainty that in that space I will hear the very things that I constantly use the clamor to drown out. And so the question becomes, how long can I keep up all the noise?

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

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

... We [can't] escape the influence of sin in the world, but [do] we have to pay money to see and hear it firsthand?

He had a clear conscience. Never used it.

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

We have become used to obstructionist ideas. In the name of modernisation we are unconsciously hindering the natural flow of life. The fact that we are irritated, depressed, and distressed speaks volumes of our illogical ambitions to acquire control of this planet. Mostly, philosophically challenged and scant respect for natural way of life is making us irrelevant.

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 and knowledge on many subjects and a keen sense of the arts and music. I admired him as he performed for us, and I forgot the ugliness again

I paved the path to the very place I don__ want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn__ put me any place else.

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

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 blessed by God.

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