They've learnt, often through bitter experience, how misguided and deluded their own feelings may be and hence look rather skeptically and caustically upon them.
Western policymakers are deluded to think that they can use their twilight of pre-eminence to lock rising powers into their own values and institutions.
You know, when you're a journalist, you truly delude yourself that you are writing the truth, and I hear journalists talk about “the truth, the truth, the truth.”
Catherine, we would fain have deluded yet: but her own quick spirit refused to delude her: it divined in secret, and brooded on the dreadful probability, gradually ripening into certainty.
How could Hagrid, even with his immense capacity to delude himself that fanged monsters were loveably harmless, fool himself that Grawp would ever be fit to mix with humans?
You've got to not be afraid to innovate, but also don't delude yourself into thinking something's working when it's not Or you can get fixated on a bad solution.
“For almost a century, the UK has deluded herself, first into believing that the days of global dominance will return, then into thinking that the symptoms of decline can be relatively easily tackled.”