Max Scheler Quote

Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper organic mendacity. Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is organic mendacity whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his interest or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is mendacious has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 77-78 - Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)