Top 87 Self Defeating Quotes
#1. To follow precisely the lead of others or advice from a book is self-defeating
Robert Greene
#2. Hostility toward Iran may not be the silliest of all American foreign policies - that would probably be the continuing trade embargo of Cuba - but it is undoubtedly the most self-defeating.
Stephen Kinzer
#3. Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.
Eric Voegelin
#4. You have considerable power to construct self-helping thoughts, feelings and actions as well as to construct self-defeating behaviors. You have the ability, if you use it, to choose healthy instead of unhealthy thinking, feeling and acting.
Albert Ellis
#5. My son . . . guilt, in proper measure, can be a useful emotion. However, when indulged to excess it becomes self-defeating, and even worse, tedious.
Lisa Kleypas
#6. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
Marya Hornbacher
#7. In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#8. Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance.
Albert Ellis
#9. Excuses are contagious, self-defeating bad habits. Where
Tommy Newberry
#10. Stop validating your victim mentality. Shake off your self-defeating drama and embrace your innate ability to recover and achieve.
Steve Maraboli
#11. Spare yourselves from the indulgence of self-pity. It is always self-defeating. Subdue the negative and emphasize the positive.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#12. The wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn.
Carol S. Dweck
#13. There are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.
Akio Morita
#14. Russians aren't perfect. Their politics are messed up, and they keep going through self-defeating economic cycles. But I have a lot of respect for Russia, and a lot of love for Russians.
Chris Hadfield
#15. Here's a payoff for everyone. The reason we hang on to self-defeating behaviors is because it's easier not to take responsibility.
Wayne Dyer
#16. I think women have a hard time not apologizing their way into negotiations. We tend to back in to these conversations in a self-deprecating and ultimately self-defeating way.
Mika Brzezinski
#17. Sitting with a bunch of adults and arguing about what's going to be most effective for kids is just sort of self-defeating.
Jake Barton
#18. A lot of our Democratic consultants have fallen into the self-defeating prescription that the candidate that runs the most negative ads wins. I have a new theory: Positive is the new negative.
Martin O'Malley
#19. Transformation occurs when existing solutions, assumed truths and past decisions are exposed as unrealistic and self-defeating.
Peter Shepherd
#20. All forms of self-defeating behavior are unseen and unconscious, which is why their existence is denied.
Vernon Howard
#22. It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
#23. The very lack of opportunity the group faces creates a self-defeating cycle and puts pressure on members to limit their aspirations.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#24. I think you'll find that one would be self-defeating." Jace said lightly shoving his feet into his boots. "We are bound, he and I. Cut him and I bleed.
Cassandra Clare
#25. I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals ... I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose.
Robert A. Heinlein
#26. All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
Aldo Leopold
#27. Revenge is self-defeating. It will eat away you until there is nothing left.
Chris Bradford
#28. As buoyancy is not contrary to other characteristics of leadership, including decisiveness, accountability and performance standards, I don't ever think it can be self-defeating.
Kevin Allen
#29. According to Aristotle, envy is pain for the presence of good things in others, whereas emulation is pain for their absence in us. This is a subtle but critical difference. Unlike envy, which is self-defeating, emulation is a good thing because it makes us take steps towards securing good things.
Neel Burton
#30. Shutting down discussion is self-defeating and impedes progress. We need to talk and listen and debate and refute and instruct and learn and evolve.
Sheryl Sandberg
#31. One quick sidebar on this topic - don't waste any more time trying to make your web pages work for browsers that don't support HTML5 - it's self-defeating and can, in many instances actually harm your position in SERP's.
Michalis Kotzakolios
#32. There is nothing more foolish or self-defeating than for a Christian to say that he is not interested in doctrines.
David Lloyd-Jones
#33. I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underpriviledged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary.
Jules Feiffer
#34. Imagine the word CANCEL being a huge rubber stamp in your mind. Stamp CANCEL on any self-defeating image you place in your head, and begin to think in a self-enhancing way.
Wayne Dyer
#35. Replace your self-defeating thoughts with self-supporting thoughts.
Deepak Chopra
#36. That is why the key to long-lasting success is to develop habits - new, positive habits that replace our self-defeating behaviors.
Rick Warren
#37. To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art - borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done.
Dorianne Laux
#38. Even to someone as notorious as Madonna, I think Jesus would say, 'I'll help you experience the fulfillment that has eluded you despite your struggle to find it. I'll help heal whatever's driving you to affirm your self-worth in self-defeating ways. But I can only help you if you let me.
Lee Strobel
#39. There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.
Max Eastman
#40. Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.
Kathleen Norris
#41. Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you.
Mark Steyn
#42. If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other. Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love.
Muhammad Ali
#43. Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it's also so disappointing and self-defeating.
Chris Hadfield
#44. When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.
Aldous Huxley
#45. we learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emotional impulses. Most important, the neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children's emotional habits.
Daniel Goleman
#46. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?
Edward St. Aubyn
#47. I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.
Harvey Cox
#48. Blame is such a self-defeating choice. It renders one helpless, putting any solution well out of reach, for we rarely can change others. Consider this, a solution well within your reach, someone you can surely change: Yourself.
Russell Kyle
#49. Quentin's conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.
Lev Grossman
#50. Love requires that we overcome the traditional and self-defeating fears that place distance between ourselves and others.
Leo Buscaglia
#51. I've never worn costume jewelry in my life. It's really very self-defeating. Why should a man buy a woman real jewelry when she wears false pieces?
Gloria Guinness
#52. Dreaming is one thing, and working towards the dream is one thing, but working with expectations in mind is very self-defeating.
Michael Landon
#53. By using your heart as your compass, you can see more clearly which direction to go to stop self-defeating behavior. If you take just one mental or emotional habit that really bothers or drains you and apply heart intelligence to it, you'll see a noticeable difference in your life.
Doc Childre
#54. We must understand how we responded to formative trauma and how that response is perpetuated today. Otherwise, we will remain stuck in self-defeating attitudes and behaviors, all the while blaming them on someone else.
Russell Willingham
#55. This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.
John Mearsheimer
#56. Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time - so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?
Evgeny Morozov
#57. Fear is the single most self-defeating emotion in our lives.
Richard Carlson
#58. After a while, we start really believing these things are true. People who have had self-defeating behaviors for a long time, such as people who have been overweight since they were children or people with longtime addictions, actually believe there is no other alternative.
Wayne Dyer
#59. Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.
Susan Rice
#60. The idea that power was an end in itself, rather than a means to provide the security and opportunity necessary for the pursuit of happiness, seemed to him stupid and self-defeating." (about Senator Fulbright)
Bill Clinton
#61. There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
James Buchan
#62. All we have to do is to receive what we are given ... We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.
Vernon Howard
#63. Amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy.
Atul Gawande
#64. When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating.
Henry Flynt
#65. Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. Striving for excellence is a positive quality. Striving for perfection is self-defeating.
Melody Beattie
#67. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.
Jon Meacham
#68. Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.
Peter Singer
#69. It's morally wrong, and economically self-defeating, that so much wealth flows upwards towards the richest of Americans, while millions work full time but still can't provide for their families.
Charles B. Rangel
#70. You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating.
Bill Keller
#71. Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.
Camille Paglia
#72. Love what you do and do what you love,
otherwise you will become unhappy and self-defeating.
Alan Sugar
#73. Pantheism is a self-defeating concept, because the concept of a God presupposes a world different from him as an essential correlate. If, on the other hand, the world is supposed to take over his role, then an absolute world without God remains; hence pantheism is only an euphemism for atheism.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#74. Trying to get my music performed live by bar bands was a self defeating experience. It really just distracted me from what I should've been doing all along, writing and recording.
Tom Scholz
#75. We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.
Gloria Steinem
#76. There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
George Wald
#77. Some of us have been playing the same self-defeating records over and over again in our heads for so long that we don't know how to think any differently about ourselves.
Steve Harvey
#78. Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world
to an individual or to a nation.
Frank Sinatra
#79. Today, to allege corruption seems to be the pastime of most people. All kinds of allegations are leveled. I think it is self-defeating.
P. Chidambaram
#80. Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships.
Stephen Covey
#81. Paradoxically, the United States' determination to protect its troops can be self-defeating. Allies and adversaries see U.S. forces living in secure compounds, eating fancy chow and minimizing their exposure to potential terrorist assaults.
David Ignatius
#82. Hinduism - indeed, most eastern religions - tells us that striving, even striving for happiness, is self-defeating. The moment you try to improve yourself, you've failed. Game over. Yet just lie there like a zombie and you lose, too. What to do?
Eric Weiner
#83. Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.
Sharon Salzberg
#84. Where are the exhortations for children to reject the self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed 'gangstas,' minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes?
Juan Williams
#85. Nobody wants to tell a truth which harms himself.
Toba Beta
#86. Success - is not about defeating others; but about defeating oneself
Ashok Kallarakkal
#87. An excuse is the most expensive brand of self defeat you will ever purchase.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
