Self Righteousness Quotes

“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
― James Crumley

“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“When we step outside ourselves and stop being merely subjective witnesses, we can recognize how the relentless cut and thrust of our own self-righteousness vanishes and new ground is broken for a state of independent thinking, where ”others” do matter. ("Wheeling and dealing.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“For the believer, humility is honesty about one's greatest flaws to a degree in which he is fearless about truly appearing less righteous than another.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“At a moment when we must face too much self-righteousness and narcissism on our path, it is a soothing relief for our soul if we can permeate through the shallowness around and penetrate the essence of matters, allowing us to still our mind.”
― Erik Pevernagie, Stilling our Mind

“Common sense is our seventh sense that is guiding our personality. It embraces all other secured senses growing in the shadow of humbleness without being dissipated by disputes, showdowns, or down-right self-righteousness. ("Wit of the staircase")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Self righteousness belongs to narrow-minded.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“You've got to let people be just, you know, people. Everyone does bad things sometimes, for all sorts of reasons. You've got to at least understand.”
― Sarah Dunn, Secrets to Happiness

“The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it’s so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial. How can anything be wrong with loving God and giving your life for good works and service to mankind?”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap,”
― Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“The deceitfulness of the heart of man appears in no one thing so much as this of spiritual pride and self-righteousness. The subtlety of Satan appears in its height, in his managing persons with respect to this sin. And perhaps one reason may be that here he has most experience; he knows the way of its coming in; he is acquainted with the secret springs of it: it was his own sin. Experience gives vast advantage in leading souls, either in good or evil.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections

“Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“We are to love God most importantly so that we can grow to love people as he loved us, not so that we can feel more divine and worthy than the worldly.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Some people looove to feel offended because it makes them feel important. When your only tool is a hammer, suddenly every problem starts to look like a nail. And when the only time you feel relevant is when you claim to be offended, suddenly everything looks offensive.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“Though there is no evil in righteousness, there is in self-righteousness,”
― David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents

“Some virtues, when they become fashions, also become exaggerated. Just because nobody likes a judgmental attitude does not mean that there isn't a sort of spoiled, self-righteous hypocrisy when one man obsessively commands other men not to judge without knowing the circumstances without himself, too, knowing their circumstances behind their judgments.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146)”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“We all have different perspectives to life. We all do take different decisions in life each day based on our convictions. We may take wrong or right decisions knowingly and or unknowingly. We may regard the decisions of others as right or wrong. We may have a right or wrong reasons to judge others. We have a choice to condemn or uplift others regardless of their situation. May we, instead of finding reasons to condemn, find reasons to uplift others.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“They strain over gnats and swallow camels. They also cannibalize each other for power.”
― Mike Duran, The Resurrection

“Some people think they are always right; they are always ready to judge those who they see as wrong!”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“We can not, therefore, reserve as sacred anything that is not truth and yet we cannot turn from things of truth have inspired us in our everyday lives. We must merely embrace both hard and soft truths that must not be avoided. This does not mean we can reserve for ourselves the right to be self-righteous nor call others self-righteous simply because they disagree with us.”
― Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction

“When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:

'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'

'I am sorry... I fear not.'

'You see where you are now!”
― Charles Ricketts, Recollections of Oscar Wilde

“I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.”
― Criss Jami

“think they are always right are always ready to judge those they perceive to be wrong!”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah