Octavio Paz Quotes

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse.

The history of the opium fight forms a queer illustration of our National blindness to our own faults, and emphasizes our National tendency to see with amazing clarity, the sins of others, while remaining blind to our own viciousness

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

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.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

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 the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

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.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

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.

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.