George Orwell Quotes

We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings.

Realize that the surface personality has no interest in anything which might disturb its darling delusions.

It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

You know the problem, we don't want to believe what we know.

Denial is a very powerful thing.

Denial is a powerful force.

I'm very good at denial.

Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial.

I actually believe in denial.

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

But sometimes living in denial was the only way to keep a man from going on a killing spree.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

In no way did I allow reality as it was to intrude on reality as I wanted it to be.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.