self-delusion

• “We all diet sometimes and we all need a spankingly good line in self-delusion, which is, let's be honest, the primary quality necessary for entering into a fast and excessive weight-loss regime.”

  The Guardian: Our preoccupation with dieting has become a national neurosis | Louise Foxcroft

• “The cruelty is unpleasant, but the self-delusion is what really takes the breath away.”

  Muley Fawns Too Cute for Field & Stream?

• “It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”

  Unforeseen difficulties.

• “But self-delusion is the quintessential attribute of all dictators.”

  The Huffington Post: Alemayehu G. Mariam: Ethiopia: Birtukan Unbound!

• “Too bad for the rest of us that the principles are dangerously divorced from reality, their idealism is so inconsistently applied as to raise questions about their sincerity, and their heroic pose reflects either cynical misrepresentation or self-delusion.”

  Matthew Yglesias » People Hate Republicans

• “It is powerful, but it is deluded and self-delusion runs deep in the US.”

  The Guardian: The United States faces a crisis not seen since the Depression | Will Hutton

• “It took searing depression to break the self-delusion in the 1930s.”

  The Guardian: The United States faces a crisis not seen since the Depression | Will Hutton

• “Unless Americans wake-up to their own self-delusion, one of the nation's two great parties will knowingly nominate a computer generated hologram of a candidate whose only demonstrated conviction is a desire to become president.”

  The Huffington Post: Charles Redfern: A Pre-fab Candidate With Pre-fab Pronouncements for a Pre-fab Country

• “You look at life for women today, it is the very definition of personal fantasy, of self-delusion, and of a narcissism so acute that to read through your average issue of a glamorous women's magazine is not that different from reading a porn magin fact, there are more adoring/self-hating naked female images in the women's mag.”

  A Conversation with Zadie Smith about On Beauty

• “And while it would be a gross exaggeration to say that there has been the same escape from reality that there was in 1929, it does seem to me that enough has happened to indicate that we haven't yet lost our capacity for speculative self-delusion.”

  The Wall Street Journal: The Non-Economist's Economist

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