Rationalize Quotes

The truth is, we are a culture built on a reward system, and our instinctive pursuit of pleasure can often lead us astray. We will rationalize anything into an excuse to indulge in whatever it is that makes us feel temporarily satiated.

It’s hard to understand the life that I live and rationalize some of the things that I do. I don’t need someone questioning every move that I make, asking me why I don’t just relax. When there’s no one asking me those types of questions… to me, it’s peaceful.

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.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It’s enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.

Conservatives should single-mindedly privilege marriage as the solution to poverty and the best path for raising successful children, and not rationalize the real of destructive cultural change.

When I was twelve or thirteen, if you liked something that was outside of your friend group genre, you had to rationalize and explain it in some way. It’s totally irrelevant, I think, now. I don’t think anybody cares. Not young people, at least. Maybe journalists.

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.

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you’re creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It’s how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

When we can communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.

Teachers are sort of faced with a thankless task, because no matter how good they are, unless they find a way to personally rationalize the rewards of their effort, nobody else is really going to do it for them en masse.

All sensible politicians favor growth, just as we all favor sound public finances. Both can be achieved if we rationalize spending, invest available resources wisely, and clamp down on tax evasion.

I’m not a big gore hound but monster gore is different to me than killing a teenager in any way that you can when another human-like person does it. I don’t know how I rationalize that really but it seems different to me.

Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on people. I could rationalize it – oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I’m writing – but it’s basically just nosiness. It also helps me gauge where I’m at: Am I normal?

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they’re doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

We intellectualize it, and we rationalize it, but it’s really about a love of movies, and I think whether you’re making an art film or you’re making a genre film, if you don’t really love that movie you are trying to make, you’ll be able to tell.

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

I love making movies, but I was ready to rationalize being only a mother if my career never got back on track.

I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.

People can rationalize in funny ways to hold onto their dreams and needs.

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.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism – the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success – actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

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

When I carve out time to game, it’s because I rationalize that I ‘deserve it,’ so I relish every minute of that 2-3 hour session.

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. Where if you’re just grinding up hamburger at McDonald‘s, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things.

Name your nation-state, or tribe or party – you have to rationalize what you’re doing. You have to go to sleep at night. Does Dick Cheney sleep at night? Does he sleep like a baby?

You have to trust yourself, not research. Not testing. Testing helps, but you have to trust your own taste. If your taste says something isn’t any good, don’t let research rationalize that out of its own truth.