Black And White Thinking Quotes

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options—to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA.
How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive.
Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.
...
I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline.
The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.”
― Michael Prager, Fat Boy Thin Man

“I never realised before how much of a jurist I am. I try to bring everything back to the basics, to black-and-white situations. The world is not a rainbow.”
― Danny Mekić

“Life would be easy if everything was black and white, but it isn’t. It would be easy if there was one side to every story, but there isn’t. There’s rarely even two.”
― Virginia Mary, Across the Great Ocean: Desolation

“The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.”
― Adolf Hitler, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Life isn’t black and white, but you can’t call it colourful either. It is actually what you make of it, so how you look at it matters a lot.”
― Prem Jagyasi, Carve Your Life: Live a great life with carvism

“Situations are rarely black or white; the truth lies somewhere in-between.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

“Things aren’t always as black and white as they appear, it isn’t for us to question.”
― Sarah Addison-Fox, Retrieve

“Dichotomous or black-and-white thinking can be dangerous and is often based on the premise of achieving perfection. It gives you only two alternatives, one of which is usually neither attainable or maintainable. The other then tends to be the black hole in which you inevitably fall after failing to get to the first. You set your sights so high, constantly chasing an ideal that you can grasp only moments at a time. When the standard for being okay is this lofty, you’re destined to feel lousy most of the time. And we know that when you feel lousy, you’re bound to end up going off the deep end in your eating behavior.”
― Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“The problem with black-and-white thinking is that you never get to see the rainbow.”
― Omar Cherif

“We must invent our enemy. If he doesn't exist, we must create him.'

'But that's crazy,' said Radius. 'It'd be like choosing to have hallucinations--seeing something that doesn't exist and saying that it does.'

'Comrade Radius,' said Flight, 'listen. There's no such thing as a perfect enemy. A real enemy is always imperfect: never perfectly evil and never perfectly invincible. He has mild, even gentle characteristics. He's vulnerable. The perfect enemy is the one you create yourself.'

'But why can't we have an imperfect enemy?' Radius persisted. 'If evil is imperfect, if it's so weak and helpless, why should we force things and give it a perfection it doesn't possess?'

'Because *we* have to be perfect,' said Flight.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“Nothing is truly black or white, beautiful or ugly, and bad or good. Perception is truly key.”
― Robin S. Baker, Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism

“As concepts like people-pleasing and self-care become more mainstream, complex ideas like boundaries are often diluted in ways that ultimately discourage us from building healthy relationships. We’re told that if someone doesn’t bring us “love and light at all times,” we should “cut them out.” We’re told that if someone disagrees with us, we should leave them behind to “protect our peace.” We’re told that if someone can’t meet every single one of our needs, we “deserve better.”

These one-dimensional platitudes ignore the reality that human relationships are complicated. They impede our healing by encouraging us to seek an unattainable standard, and they prevent us from looking inward to assess how we may be contributing to our own unhappiness or disempowerment.”
― Hailey Paige Magee, Stop People Pleasing: And Find Your Power

“If the world was black and white then darkness would have never mind , the night would have never cried and the day would have never smiled ...”
― muskan bhatia

“Life is better in black and white!”
― Avijeet Das

“In a time of danger, the person sounding the paranoid continual alarm will eventually be right. A voice arguing for our complete rightness and the complete wrongness of our enemies, a voice constantly broadening the definition of "enemy," relieves us of the burden of living with ambiguity.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn’t matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you’re forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We’re different that way.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, If You Come Softly

“I had not thought about this, but it was true. There was no black and white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. Ania was just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like to have such issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms: this is all good and that is all bad.”
― Theodore John Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future