Moral evasion Quotes

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Ideology…is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure.

The devil made me do it.

One accurate way to describe abortion is subtle infanticide. That is: child-killing done in a way that the people don't recognize it as child-killing. That reality is why the word abortion exists. Some words are created to cloak reality the same way procedures are created to cloak reality. "Abortion" is cloaked child-killing

Being judgmental about your own behavior is actually another cop-out because it makes you feel as though you're doing something virtuous.

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Everyone's constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.

The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences

Widespread personification of “society” is another verbal tactic that evades issues of individual responsibility. Such use of the term “society” is a more sophisticated version of the notion that “the devil made me do it.” Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.

It prevents me from sniffing out heresy, and so gives me an excuse for shutting my eyes to the different views of my neighbors.

We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.

I don't hang anyone—the law does.

[On the Vietnam War:] I leave all morality up to you clergymen.

Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.

When we don't like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak about killing a baby within the womb, but about "termination of potential life." Words are often multiplied to try to cover dark deeds.

One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven't treated very well; it's much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn't nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.

The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself.

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.

where everybody is guilty, nobody is.

The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins.

There’s no accountability anymore, Pierce, no one holds anyone accountable for what they do. It’s always someone else’s fault. Usually people just blame the victim.