A Quote by Clancy Martin

Both of us, me and Friedrich Nietzsche being writers, if we weren't capable of some strategic self-deception, we would have moved on to more lucrative careers long ago.
What is the most fascinating kind of self-deception to me, and a kind that isn't necessarily unhealthy, is what Friedrich Nietzsche called "strategic self-deception." The kind of self-deception that you can engage in with your eyes wide open. You do it because you say, "There's things that I couldn't accomplish without this kind of self-deception."
If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known.
That's the old AA maxim, "Always have a drink in your hand and you'll never want a drink." That's one of the most classic deceptions in the literature: "I'll take a drink tomorrow." I actually don't think that's necessarily a very helpful maxim in AA, but it's a very good maxim in showing how strategic self-deception can be employed, even self-consciously. That's the amazing thing, to me, about self-deception.
If... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.
Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!
I would have had my patent long, long ago, and it would have run out long, long ago. I would have made, maybe, $100.000, much less that the patent has brought me now.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche commenting on the music of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health.
Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.
Many of us are more capable than some of us... but none of us is as capable as all of us!
I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like Gordimer and Coetzee have produced major books. But some of the more minor writers have drifted away.
A long time ago when I was very little, I dreamed about being on stage. Some people told me I would never be able to do it, so I only paid attention to those who told me that I could.
I have the good fortune of knowing both John McCain and Donald Trump well, both men have more in common than the today's media hype would have you believe. Both blazed trails in their careers and love our great nation.
In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.
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