#delusion

I'm busy doing my job, and being a loudmouth doesn't appeal to me as much as when I was younger and had the youthful delusion that I was smarter than everybody else. ↗

— Steve Albini

#being #busy #delusion #doing #else

I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil. ↗

— Suzanne Finnamore

#delusion #divorce #infidelity #marriage #men

If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion. ↗

— Max Scheler

#age

The attitude we have towards our personal pets as opposed to the animals that suffer under the factory farm is hypocritical and delusional. ↗

— James Cromwell

#delusional #factory #farm #hypocritical #opposed

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#delusion #despite #evidence #lack #people

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth! ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#biology #god-delusion #science #intelligence

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. ↗

— Thomas Reed

#delusions #evils #greatest #hope #legislation

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#battles #hegel #history #life #reminiscence

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing. ↗

— John Cheever

#delusions #dissatisfaction #fables #indifference #jokes

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led. ↗

— Alex Haley

#privilege #slavery #wealth #beauty