Top 40 Carol Tavris Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “History is written by the victors, but it’s victims who write the memoirs.”

— Carol Tavris

2. “In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.”

— Carol Tavris

3. “Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.”

— Carol Tavris

4. “Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.”

— Carol Tavris

5. “For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.”

— Carol Tavris

6. “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. – historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle.”

— Carol Tavris

7. “The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit it.”

— Carol Tavris

8. “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

— Carol Tavris

9. “No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: “I’m sorry; I didn’t see you; are you all right?” The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.”

— Carol Tavris

10. “As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life. Hysteria trumps evidence.”

— Carol Tavris

11. “Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.”

— Carol Tavris

12. “Science is a form of arrogance control.”

— Carol Tavris

13. “I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. – Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948.”

— Carol Tavris

14. “To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.”

— Carol Tavris

15. “Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye – it constricts.”

— Carol Tavris

16. “Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and they are usually denigrated for their efforts.”

— Carol Tavris

17. “It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.”

— Carol Tavris

18. “Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.”

— Carol Tavris

19. “When it comes to food, there are two large categories of eaters, those who do not worry about what they eat but should, and those who do worry about what they eat but should not.”

— Carol Tavris

20. “During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person’s life. Hysteria trumps evidence.”

— Carol Tavris

21. “When politicians’ backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it. The phrase “mistakes were made” is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke – what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the “past exonerative” tense.”

— Carol Tavris

22. “We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.”

— Carol Tavris

23. “The second-sweetest set of three words in English is ‘I don’t know.’”

— Carol Tavris

24. “The history of the women’s movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.”

— Carol Tavris

25. “It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them. – playwright Lillian Hellman.”

— Carol Tavris

26. “Severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group.”

— Carol Tavris

27. “A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.”

— Carol Tavris

28. “Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author’s comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.”

— Carol Tavris

29. “No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who has not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.”

— Carol Tavris

30. “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. – George Orwell, 1946.”

— Carol Tavris

31. “We want to hear, we long to hear, “I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again.” Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy’s admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan’s response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as “I didn’t do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I’ll take responsibility.”3 That doesn’t cut it.”

— Carol Tavris

32. “Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine – but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can’t.”

— Carol Tavris

33. “There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple likelihood that you will probably be found out anyway – by.”

— Carol Tavris

34. “A fan without a team is like a hog without truffles – she has nothing to root for.”

— Carol Tavris

35. “Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images:.”

— Carol Tavris

36. “The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots – of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions.”

— Carol Tavris

37. “All of us can carry this understanding into our private lives: Something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be. Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves. The road to redemption starts with the understanding that who we are includes what we have done but also transcends it, and the vehicle for transcending it is self-compassion.”

— Carol Tavris

38. “Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.”

— Carol Tavris

39. “It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable aspects of life that help us improve our work, make better decisions, grow, and grow up.”

— Carol Tavris

40. “Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.”

— Carol Tavris

41. “Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened – typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.”

— Carol Tavris

42. “The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.”

— Carol Tavris

43. “In the previous chapter, we saw on a smaller scale how divorcing couples typically justify the hurt they inflict on each other. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, because our victims deserved what they got, we hate them even more than we did before we harmed them, which in turn makes us inflict even more pain on them.”

— Carol Tavris

44. “We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.”

— Carol Tavris

45. “When you do anything that harms others – get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out – a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.”

— Carol Tavris

46. “In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary.”

— Carol Tavris

47. “The manual is written in an authoritative tone as if it were the voice of God revealing indisputable truths, but in fact it fails to teach its readers a core principle of scientific thinking: the importance of examining and ruling out other possible explanations for a person’s behavior before deciding which one is the most likely.”

— Carol Tavris

48. “Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, ‘He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,’ were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.”

— Carol Tavris

49. “When affluent people speak of the underprivileged, they rarely thank their lucky stars that they are privileged, let alone consider that they might be overprivileged. Privilege is their blind spot.7 It is invisible and they don’t think twice about it; they justify their social position as something they are entitled to. In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary.”

— Carol Tavris