James Frey Quotes

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 was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

he was trying to convince himself that he wasn't guilty.

If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

What amazes me is how far some people will go to justify their behavior to themselves, just to preserve that self-perception.

I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.

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.

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.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

We can always find noble reasons for what we want to do.

Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway.

I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

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.

People go down bad paths and they make bad decisions, but it's always justified in their head.

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.'

Human beings will justify anything.

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.

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.

In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

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