Doublethink/Quotes

Madness is horrific, but there's a kind of comfort in the madness we make ourselves. Strip away logic and consistency, and you're left with an ever-shifting morass of phenomena where you can be, do, and believe anything you want, where consequences can be dismissed as the flawed reasoning of thinkers limited by cause-and-effect, where contradictions are merely two sides of the richness of your ideas.

— an excerpt from Genius: The Transgression, describing the Phenomenologists

The desperate effort to deceive others must, therefore, be regarded as, on the whole, an attempt to aid the self in believing a pretension it cannot easily believe because it was itself the author of the deception. If others will only accept what the self cannot quite accept, the self as deceiver is given an ally against the self as deceived.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man

The self-deceiver does not believe … what he says or he would not be a deceiver. He does believe what he says or he would not be deceived. He both believes and does not believe … or he would not be self-deceived.

—Philip Leon (quoted in Niebuhr, above)

The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices, — a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes, — a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long.

—Thomas Carlyle, Latter-day Pamphlets