Top 35 Roy F. Baumeister Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

2. “Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair the processing of glucose, which produces immediate consequences for self-control – and, over the long term, a higher risk of diabetes.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

3. “Illusions, distortions, and self-deception appear to be integral to the way normal, well-adjusted people perceive the world. Seeing things as they really are is associated with depression and low self-esteem.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

4. “First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

5. “Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

6. “That’s the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

7. “However you define success – a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions – it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

8. “Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

9. “Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means. If they evaluate their methods by the same lofty standards by which they judge their goals and purposes, evil will be held in check.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

10. “We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

11. “When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better?”

— Roy F. Baumeister

12. “We can understand instrumental evil as the use of a particular set of means to pursue goals that, alternatively, might be pursued with acceptable means. The key question for understanding this form of evil then becomes: What makes people choose evil means rather than other, more acceptable ones?”

— Roy F. Baumeister

13. “The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

14. “Culture is partly made out of information. There are at least two main types of this information. One is a set of shared beliefs and values. The other is shared knowledge of how to do things. Culture consists of both.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

15. “The magnitude gap is also reflected in different time perspectives. Oppression, violence, and cruelty fade much faster into the distant past for the perpetrator than for the victim.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

16. “A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil – less wrong – to the perpetrators than to the victims.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

17. “The result suggests that telling yourself ‘I can have this later’ operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree – and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat... the ones who’d postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

18. “Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator’s own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

19. “The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

20. “Because of the importance of perceiving the means as morally acceptable, there may be a strong ongoing need for justification in idealistic evil. The person is doing something that would normally be regarded as wrong, such as killing or hurting people. Somehow, the person must sustain the belief that it is right. This is often done by focusing on the goodness of the overriding goal.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

21. “The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

22. “Romantic jealousy is another experience in which people become irrationally oversensitive because of implicit blows to their pride.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

23. “When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

24. “Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

25. “Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

26. “For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

27. “Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” The.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

28. “The ones who wrote about what they had already achieved had higher satisfaction with their current tasks and projects, as compared with the ones who reflected on what they had not yet achieved. But.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

29. “The myth of pure evil, then, is surprisingly durable and elastic. Even when each side provokes and antagonizes the other, the myth can be invoked. Ironically, the myth fails to acknowledge mutual provocation, but it appears that both sides in a conflict are quite capable of seeing themselves as innocent victims and the other as unreasonably, gratuitously wicked.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

30. “The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

31. “We’ve seen parents successfully use a variant of this approach when an infant cries to be fed. Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it’s hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

32. “The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

33. “When the dessert cart arrives, don’t gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. In the spirit of Scarlett O’Hara, tell yourself: Tomorrow is another taste.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

34. “Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

35. “The reliance on judgments by others is essential. Indeed, if we limited our examination of evil to acts that perpetrators themselves acknowledge as evil, there would be hardly any such acts to examine.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

36. “Even within a family, the demands of taking care of children may clash with those of maintaining a good relationship with one’s spouse, which may help explain why marital satisfaction declines when a couple gives birth to their first child and goes back up when the last child finally moves out.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

37. “The problem with adolescents – from the parents’ point of view – is that they have a child’s power of self-control presiding over an adult’s wants and urges.”

— Roy F. Baumeister

38. “Otherwise, his desk is immaculate. In accordance with the four Ds of his system, everything that has not been done, delegated, or dropped has been deferred to a half dozen two-drawer file cabinets, which contain his alphabetized plastic folders with labels printed by the little machine next to his computer. You might dismiss this all as evidence of dreary anal-retentiveness, but Allen could not be less dour or more relaxed.”

— Roy F. Baumeister