QUOTE : Richard III's monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler's speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in its utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong. Milton describes such rationalization in Paradise Lost in Eve, both before she eats the fruit of the forbidden tree and afterwards, when she justifies inducing Adam to eat:<br />So dear I love him, that with him all deaths <br />I could endure, without him live no life.<br />(Pl, IX. 832-33)<br />Eve makes this profession of love for Adam at the moment when she is, in effect, planning to kill him.