Roy F. Baumeister > Quotes

“What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The myth of pure evil depicts innocent victims fighting against gratuitously wicked, sadistic enemies. The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it. As we will soon see, belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Among university professors, for example, getting tenure is a major hurdle and milestone, and at most universities tenure depends heavily on having published some high-quality, original work. One researcher, Bob Boice, looked into the writing habits of young professors just starting out and tracked them to see how they fared. Not surprisingly, in a job where there is no real boss and no one sets schedules or tells you what to do, these young professors took a variety of approaches. Some would collect information until they were ready and then write a manuscript in a burst of intense energy, over perhaps a week or two, possibly including some long days and very late nights. Others plodded along at a steadier pace, trying to write a page or two every day. Others were in between. When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. 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, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“lock yourself into a virtuous path.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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, Meanings of Life

“The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“A central fact about evil is the discrepancy between the importance of the act to the perpetrator and to the victim. This can be called the magnitude gap. The importance of what takes place is almost always much greater for the victim than for the perpetrator. When trying to understand evil, one is always asking, "How could they do such a horrible thing?" But the horror is usually being measured in the victim's terms. To the perpetrator, it is often a very small thing. thing. As we saw earlier, perpetrators generally have less emotion about their acts than do victims. It is almost impossible to submit to rape, pillage, impoverishment, or possible murder without strong emotional reactions, but it is quite possible to perform those crimes without emotion.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“As a general pattern, suffering
stimulates a quest for meaningful explanation.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion
may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Meanings of Life

“But the eventual results were too intriguing to ignore. When people were placed in front of a mirror, or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. These self-conscious people worked harder at laboratory tasks. They gave more valid answers to questionnaires (meaning that their answers jibed more closely with their actual behavior). They were more consistent in their actions, and their actions were also more consistent with their values.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Many research findings show that most Americans already hold inflated opinions of themselves.”
― Roy F Baumeister

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil—less wrong—to the perpetrators than to the victims.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“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, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength