J. P. Morgan Quotes

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.

No matter how bad the individual, everybody has reasons for why they do what they do.

Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it's the wrong reason.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don't want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves - along with others - about our reasons and motives.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Hypocrisy is a detriment to progress. There's always a hidden agenda.

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

Don't fight the problem, decide it.

Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

Motives are often more important than actions

Ambition is the mother of hypocrisy and prefers to skulk in corners and dark places. It cannot endure the light of day. It is an unclean vice wallowing in the depths, always hidden, but with ever an eye to advancement.

Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.

Thinking is easy; action is difficult; to act in accordance with one’s thought is the most difficult thing in the world.

Whenever they tell you there's no change in policy, that's the surest sign that something's up.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.

It's not what you don't know that kills you but what you know that isn't so.