Quotes About Defensiveness

#1. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse predict an ailing marriage: Criticism, Defensiveness, Stonewalling and Contempt. The worst of these is contempt.

John M. Gottman

#2. Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

E. M. Forster

#3. My defensiveness in life really helps me as a driver.

Larry David

#4. You can't see clearly through defensiveness.

Bryant McGill

#5. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Audre Lorde

#6. As NVC replaces our old patterns of defending, withdrawing or attacking in the face of judgment and criticism. We come to perceive ourselves and others, as well as our intentions and relationships, in a new light. Resistance, defensiveness, and violent reactions are minimized.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#7. That was his phrase - "the high ramparts of my defensiveness"- and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

Brock Clarke

#8. Any defensiveness is a sign of failure. You can't move forward if you are defensive.

Bryant McGill

#9. Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#10. True sincerity reveals a powerful form of clarity and discernment that is necessary in order to perceive yourself honestly without flinching or being held captive by your conditioned mind's judgments and defensiveness.

Adyashanti

#11. Mixing defensiveness with anger - a wonderful mix, by the way.

Liza Palmer

#12. He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone

Celeste Ng

#13. The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

John O'Donohue

#14. Author describes that a failed sea captain, vacillated miserably between self-recrimination and defensiveness.

Joseph Wheelan

#15. I think the main thing that has to end is men's defensiveness.

Jon Stewart

#16. Lesson number one: defensiveness is defeat. Never defend yourself.

Leah Raeder

#17. All defensiveness and emotional tumult is a fear response because of your need for acceptance and ruthless control of the territory of your safe fantasy world.

Bryant McGill

#18. Mutual defensiveness moves parents and children away from intersubjective experience and joint influence and into a desire to gain control of the situation. To

Daniel A. Hughes

#19. Guilt politics ... I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring.

Robin Morgan

#20. Be honest, Look for areas where you can admit error and say so. Apologize for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness.

Dale Carnegie

#21. You need your ego to survive in the three-dimensional world, but you need only that part of the ego which processes information. The rest - pride, arrogance, defensiveness, fear - is worse than useless. The rest of the ego separates you from wisdom, joy, and God.

Brian Weiss

#22. I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.

Marilynne Robinson

#23. You can get to a place where you see clearly; that place is zero defensiveness.

Bryant McGill

#24. A lot of people think my sarcasm comes from insecurity and defensiveness, but I assure you I'm just being petty and cruel.

Dana Gould

#25. It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced

Peter M. Senge

#26. Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning.

Melanie Joy

#27. In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

Carl Rogers

#28. To get greater than 100% return on a growth step, give up defensiveness. Defensiveness stifles performance, and destroys relationships.

Henry Cloud

#29. Defensiveness is usually someone silently screaming that they need you to value and respect them in disguise. When you look for deeper meanings behind someone's pain you can then begin to heal not only yourself, but others.

Shannon L. Alder

#30. The student's job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.

Renee Fleming

#31. I'm a fallible human being - but if I were to react to that knowledge with fear/defensiveness then how would I move forward?

Jay Woodman

#32. Physical life is characterized by defensiveness, whereas spiritual life is just the opposite.

Eben Alexander

#33. A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.

Carl Rogers

#34. All defensiveness stems from the need to be right and frustration over not being able to control others.

Bryant McGill

#35. When things get personal, we need to resist the natural male instinct to run for cover, man the defenses, or--worst of all--reach for the big guns. Much better to set aside our natural defensiveness and focus on listening well even though we feel under attack. Because we're probably not.

Jeff Feldhahn

#36. The Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

Malcolm Gladwell

#37. Yielding to emotions such as anger or hurt or defensiveness will drive away the Holy Ghost.

Richard G. Scott

#38. This language is from the head. It is a way of mentally classifying people into varying shades of good and bad, right and wrong. Ultimately, it provokes defensiveness, resistance, and counterattack. It is a language of demands.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#39. You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope.

Junot Diaz

#40. The culture around us knows what it means when they see a church in perpetual bluster and outrage. They know that we are scared.

Russell D. Moore

#41. The fact that California was the most cosmopolitan state in the union, as a result of the gold rush, simply made white voters more susceptible to racist and xenophobic arguments.

H.W. Brands

#42. This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.

N.K. Jemisin

#43. She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.

Stephen L. Carter

#44. The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#45. The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

Brian Luke Seaward

#46. Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.

David Halberstam

#47. Defend myself? I cannot defend the verbal repressions of a boy. A curmudgeonly, cantankerous, ill-tempered, counterfeit boy.

Coco J. Ginger

#48. People must have dignity and identity. If they can't do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.

Joseph Tirella

#49. You don't need to play every ball on back foot. Some balls in life deserve to be played on front foot. Every ball needs good judgement to extend the limit.

Amit Ray

#50. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.

Christopher Hitchens

#51. Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities.

George F. Will

#52. Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.

Lorrie Moore

#53. You don't need to play every ball but every ball needs your judgement.

Amit Ray

#54. Professing not to care is a primordial defense mechanism. Whenever a person finds oneself mired in failure and despondency, rebelling is a viable option to preserve false personal pride.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#55. At best, people are open to scrutinizing themselves and considering their blind spots; at worst, they become defensive and angry.

Sheryl Sandberg

#56. I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.

Anthony Kiedis

#57. Have we become so defensive that we cannot even tolerate a kind act?

Kyra Gregory

#58. The writer as boxer says he develops by, "learning from everyone who'll spar with me.

Davis Miller

#59. It would be better to be deceived a hundred times than to live a life of suspicion.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#60. In the name of "force protection," the military often rolls up windows, builds walls, and points rifles at the outside world. The best force protection, however, is to be surrounded by friends and allies.

Eric Greitens