Cognitive Dissonance Quotes

“Reality Check
His lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he’s with. That doesn’t mean you’re an angel and he’s the devil. It does mean that if he doesn’t like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself.

The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don’t feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to.
Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection—and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can’t erase his lies, and as we’ll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.”
― Susan Forward

“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

“The human need to be visible is countered by the need to be invisible to avoid further abuse, and the need for intimacy and the dread of abuse, all pose insoluble dichotomies which promote further withdrawal from human contact, which reinforces the sense of dehumanisation.”
― Christiane Sanderson, Introduction to Counselling Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma

“We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”
― William James

“Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I continue to live inside a dichotomy: what was and what shall be. The pain in my skull is me trying to mesh the two.”
― Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations

“How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive at this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face– and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance. When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.”
― Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

“The question is not, do you have conflicts? The real question is, are you aware of your conflicts?”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac

“And that is why they let us down so badly.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger . . . We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“My life is the life of a spectator:
watching myself and
watching everyone.
This life of mine
does not bear resemblance to me.”
― Belle Townsend

“If you know the Emperor is naked, then why are you wasting time arguing about what colour his imaginary clothes are?”
― Nate Hamon

“A mind that has no conflict, is not alive.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac

“Anybody who says they don't have any conflict, is either lying or deluding themselves.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac

“There is an animal in all of us, the sooner we recognize it, the sooner we can turn human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted

“If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.”
― Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World

“The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all . . . the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward . . . They come together . . . to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people . . . and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them! . . . Ah, dear heart, lately it has become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Well, it won't be for long!”
― Leo Tolstoy

“To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liing something that others seem to take so much pleasure in, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy.”
― Ryan Hoover, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“Will You Be My Poetry (The Sonnet)

You keep calling me a poet,
I embrace the sentiment but not the title.
I may have some power over words,
But the words themselves are nothing valuable.
It's the world behind the words that matters,
A world where all walls collapse and wither.
Once you wake up to that world,
Save human, all other titles disappear.
In that world of oneness you shall discover,
My words are not the real poetry.
My true poetry is your own humanness,
I am but a reflection of your struggling humanity.
So let's get rid of this poet and reader business!
You be my poetry, I'll be your pages.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“I hate violence - you know why, because I'm afraid - terribly afraid – every single minute of my existence - I'm afraid of myself - I'm afraid of my own rage - I'm afraid, that if I raise my hand at someone, there won't be any trace of them left.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all . . . the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward . . . They come together . . . to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people . . . and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them! . . . Ah, dear heart, lately it has become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Well, it won't be for long!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“...we made all the necessary rhetorical changes to make it look like we were aligning ourselves with a burgeoning democracy...”
― John J. Mearsheimer

“If you've convinced yourself that a market correction is likely (your belief) to justify holding cash rather than investing (your action), you may be under the influence of cognitive dissonance.”
― Coreen T. Sol, Unbiased Investor: Reduce Financial Stress and Keep More of Your Money

“A pompous, arrogant, narcissistic intellectual came up to me at a conference and said rather boastfully.

"You must feel really good about yourself to be the nice guy all the time! But let me tell you something - it takes balls to say what's really on your mind. You might have heard, the best defense is a good offense..."

He went on and on for a while, and the more he spoke the more his intolerant nature became evident. I listened to everything he had to say, then heaved a soft sight, and replied with a smile.

"You are absolutely right! Ama senin gibi şerefsiz olmak insanın lazım yok - porque, no soy un hijo de puta como tú - nu okka chetta na kodakkala behave cheskovachhu, kaani naaku anthaa scene ledu."

He looked rather annoyed, because all my words went over his head, so he flared out, "don't beat around the bush, man - say, what you want to say!"

I spoke calmly. "I'd love to speak my mind, but I wouldn't want to give anyone an inferiority complex. Bad behavior don't make us cool, it only exposes the fool we are. If bad behavior made the world better, we'd already be living in utopia, instead of still struggling for basic human rights."

I didn't want the argument to linger any longer, so I asked him to join me for lunch. You see, self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Bad behavior don't make us cool, it only exposes the fool we are.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Those who speak of their anger, their mistrust, or their dislike of certain groups tend not to see any contradiction in this behaviour and their claims to be moral, professional, or effective psychologists.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“The retort that “patriarchy hurts men too” rings hollow and highlights the flaw of “infallibility” of patriarchy theory in that it contorts itself to claim that men as a group are simultaneously both dominant and oppressed.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“Що в цей час відбувалось із мешканцями міст? Із тими, які традиційно гидують кров’ю? Бійню своїх співвітчизників вони сприймають з відразою та обуренням, приділяючи достатньо уваги філософським роздумам, історичним паралелям і різноманітним поясненням. Але, коли у ЗМІ з’являються світлини, на яких знавіснілим злочинцем, жорстоким убивцею, є хтось із їхнього народу, а жертва — з іншого, ось тоді наші громадяни (байдуже, чи йдеться про журналістів, політиків, інтелектуалів чи сантехніків) передусім заперечують очевидний факт, стверджуючи, що побачена ними світлина насправді вигадка, монтаж та ворожа пропаганда. А коли вже неможливо заперечувати здійснені жорстокі вбивства, тоді вони починають закидати, що злочин скоїли російські або англійські найманці, лише «аби нам нашкодити».”
― Miljenko Jergović, Жертвам сниться велика воєнна перемога