A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat ... but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage ...in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Women's] apparent endorsement of male supremacy is ... a pathetic striving for self- respect, self-justification, and self-pardon.... After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors--that the master is lesser than the slave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I haven't seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked... this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company's behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's coopera...tion and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean betw...een self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can be but imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right solution rarely presents itself, until that stern critic, aged experience, has been furnished with ample justification for venting his sarcastic humor upon the irreparable blunders we have already made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether or not overtly sadistic, the psychology behind pornographic works justifies male domination by asserting that women crave ...being controlled while avoiding qualities that might contradict this justification, such as affection, tenderness, and the awareness of another person's feelings. Pornography also contains an important element of sexual reprisal against women, arising out of men's self-disgust at their dependence on female "inferiority" for the measure of their own "superiority."... Erotica is free of these sexual politics; forming only one component of human relations, its sexuality, which stresses mutual satisfaction, is subordinated to a larger artistic design.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am looking over Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently-meant, elegantly-written... Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discr...iminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count ...for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »