Peter Benchley Quotes

Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us.

Every lie has 2 parts - the lie we tell others and the one we tell ourselves to justify it.

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

I thought I was fooling people. But it's the old thing of 'they say vodka doesn't smell'. No, not until you sweat. And you just lie and lie and you think 'I can deal with this'. And then you finally go, 'No you can't'. And then you give up.

It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

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

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

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.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.

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.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

They're like ''You're an alcoholic.'' I go ''No, I'm not.'' and then-apparently that's what alcoholics say too, you know?

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

The heart lies to itself because it must.