I didn’t see it mentioned in the comments so I guess I get to be the person to post the quote!

> “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”

Excerpt From Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut

This is often quoted from Mother Night but it’s actually in the preface so I don’t know how many people actually see it within the work. Anyways, rather than self aggrandizing in the way the linked article is, the story in the book is a cautionary take. The book is about a Nazi propagandist that is secretly an American agent feeding broadcast lines to the Allied forces in subtleties in communicating his propaganda like pauses in between words and other tics.

The idea in the book is what does it matter to be a good person in private but a driver of evil in public? How much bad does it take to outweigh good and if you do bad things to effect something positive, are you absolved of those bad things anyways?

No, I think not. If you do ill to achieve good you are accountable to both. It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that some thing you’ve done has overridden and eliminated some other thing you’ve done but it isn’t really true. You’ve done both. I recognize I’m speaking in circles a little but I think it’s important to confront the idea that the things you’ve done are not undone by other things you’ve done just because you feel the ends have justified the means.

Remember that who you think you are is a private fantasy. Who you actually are is how you are experienced.