Nell Scovell Quotes

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.

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.

It's very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It's not just because they are evil, but because that's how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It's always interesting figuring out how that happens.

Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn't assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they're largely the consequence of the mind's attempt to make a rational decision.

I was fascinated that everybody in the story thinks that they're in the right.

There's an interesting trend that occurs in times of mounting pressure and high uncertainty, which is that it's a natural human tendency to seek out people that agree with us, that are similar to us because it's a source of comfort in a world that's so rapidly changing.

Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people to sort items into categories and respond based on what is usually associated with those categories: a form of statistical discrimination, playing the odds.

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?

Nobody thinks that they're evil or bad, they think that they're doing the right thing.

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Perpetrators absolve their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes.

I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.

Very few people do bad things because they're bad. They generally do bad things because they think they're the right thing to do, but they're misplaced.

I think every villain basically thinks that he or she is doing something to make his world, or the world in general, a better place.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

All sin and all crime comes from the same thing: 'I decided. I decided this was okay.'

There's a momentum to being committed to a group that you think is good, and there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make your choice a good choice.

Nobody sees themselves as being an evil person or doing something for a bad reason. There's always something that justifies it to themselves.

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.

Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

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.