Top 100 Never Justify Quotes
#1. I never justify, sustain, or in any way or to any extent uphold this cruel, heartless, aimless unnecessary war.
Franklin Pierce
#2. An existant can never justify the existence of another existant.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#3. But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
#4. Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.
George Eliot
#6. The ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
#7. Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.
Bob Dylan
#9. Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.
Josef Pieper
#10. You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian McEwan
#11. Incurable diseases will eventually
force mankind to justify
disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering.
Toba Beta
#12. It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it.
Stephen Sondheim
#13. Tradition can not justify such misery. Surely people can enjoy themselves at a non-animal circus with exciting human acts instead?
Claire McClennan
#14. The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the 'battlefield' is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited 'battlefield.'
Glenn Greenwald
#15. The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#16. ... once you start demonizing groups of people, when you make them the other, you can justify doing just about anything you want to the, can't you? Look at history if you don't believe me.
Brunonia Barry
#17. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.
Don Henley
#19. I cant justify taking money away from hungry kids and needy schools to pay for the Games when corporations are willing to write the checks.
Mary Lou Retton
#20. I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys.
No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#21. Many sweat to reconcile St Paul and St James, but in vain. 'Faith justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me a fool.
Martin Luther
#22. Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Milan Kundera
#23. Stories can educate, elevate, comfort, and afflict those who are too comfortable. They can create community. They can also drive people apart, justify unspeakable crimes, and destroy the most basic concepts of civil society. You
Jonathan Shapiro
#24. The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
Nick Harkaway
#25. A pessimist asked God for relief. Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness, said God. No, replied the petitioner, I wish you to create something that would justify them. The world is all created,said God, but you have overlooked something
Ambrose Bierce
#26. The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis
only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.
Dag Hammarskjold
#27. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.
Brad S. Gregory
#28. Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#29. It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
#30. You cannot force the Now. - But can you neither condemn nor justify and yet be extraordinarily alive as you walk on? You can never invite the wind, but you must leave the window open.
Bruce Lee
#31. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
E. O. Wilson
#32. Your theology won't always work toward your obedience, because your use of theology is dictated by the condition of your heart. If your heart is not submitting to the plan of God, you will actually use your theology to justify things that should not be justified.
Paul David Tripp
#33. The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#34. You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.
Vance Havner
#36. I stand by the stuff I say, even the really stupid stuff. I'll find a way to justify it.
Blake Shelton
#37. History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
Edward Gibbon
#38. I am no longer amazed by how quickly a man will justify his change of heart when a spear is leveled his way.
R.A. Salvatore
#39. The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.
Joseph Conrad
#40. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.
Charb
#41. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edward Said
#42. The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
#43. The doctrine stating signs and wonders are no longer needed because we have the Bible was created by people who hadn't seen God's power and needed an explanation to justify their own powerless churches.
Bill Johnson
#44. In every job, I would justify it in my mind, whether I loved it or hated it, that I was getting paid to learn and every experience would be of value when I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Mark Cuban
#45. When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.
Patrick Carney
#46. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain De Botton
#47. Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#48. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify.
Francis Picabia
#49. Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
Paul Celan
#50. Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
Eric Hoffer
#51. The gospel isn't just enough to justify the ungodly; it's enough to regenerate and sanctify the ungodly. However, only because (in the narrower sense) the good news announces our justification are we for the first time free to embrace God as our Father rather than our Judge.
Michael S. Horton
#52. I felt strongly that since the pursuit of good science was so difficult it was essential that the problem being studied was an important one to justify the effort expanded.
Paul Nurse
#53. I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
Alberto Manguel
#54. One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify ... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.
Gilbert F. White
#55. Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.
Stephen Kendrick
#56. The claim 'I was only following orders' has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history.
Marc Okrand
#57. I like the story about me being pregnant. It was in some Australian magazine, on the front page! I was like, 'Wow, that's just [insane].' And it's not even ironic. I don't even think the article [tried to justify it]; it was just a headline. The article was just like, nothing.
Robert Pattinson
#58. I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty, and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.
Oscar Arias
#59. Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#60. Most (Christians) have an ungrounded trust in Christ, hoping that He will pardon, justify and save them, while the world has their hearts, and they live to the flesh. And this trust they take as justifying faith.
Richard Baxter
#61. If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.
Maxwell Maltz
#62. If God justify a man, who shall condemn him? But if God condemn him, who shall justify him?
Thomas Watson
#63. If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case.
Abraham Lincoln
#64. Of one thing be certain: if a CEO is enthused about a particularly foolish acquisition, both his internal staff and his outside advisors will come up with whatever projections are needed to justify his stance. Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked.
Warren Buffett
#65. In the U.S., PC-makers have no incentive to lower prices because it kills their profit margins. They keep adding new features like high-end retina displays and faster processors to justify their high prices.
Vivek Wadhwa
#66. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.
Adelle Waldman
#67. Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.
Samuel Richardson
#68. There is evil in the world. Things might be easier if there wasn't, if good and evil were just concepts men invented to justify themselves; we could ignore them, then. Sadly, good and evil are both very real, and very inconvenient.
Seanan McGuire
#69. You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.
Garrison Keillor
#70. I hate organized religion. I hate that people use it to justify their crappy, bigoted beliefs.
Hannah Harrington
#71. Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.
Dan Ariely
#72. I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.
William Golding
#73. Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.
Hamza Yusuf
#74. Some presentation authors justify this by saying, "The photographer already knew it was going to be an uncredited effort and it really isn't that hard to take a good photograph.
Neal Ford
#75. Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.
Alveda King
#76. Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#77. Quit being so hard on yourself. We are what we are; we love what we love. We don't need to justify it to anyone ... not even to ourselves.
Scott Lynch
#78. We don't need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It's how we justify killing each other.
Charlie Jane Anders
#79. We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it ... No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
Robert H. Jackson
#80. Being an actor is looked at like a prolonged game of dress-up. America puts movie stars on pedestals. In college, it's the flip side. I sometimes have to justify my job to my professors because they're focused on intellect and ideas.
Julia Stiles
#81. Took me a few years to understand what intelligence is; Took me an entire lifetime to understand ignorance. I still haven't found an explanation for ignorance, because the ignorant are too ignorant to justify their ignorance.
Robin Sacredfire
#82. Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Bertrand Russell
#83. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#84. Generalizations about the "way women are" and estimates of what is appropriate for most women no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#85. We sometimes look among our numbers to find one to whom we can point who agrees with us, so we can have company to justify our apostasy. We rationalize by saying that someday the Church doctrine will catch up with our way of thinking. Truth is not established by Gallup polls.
Ezra Taft Benson
#86. Her not objecting, does not justify him. It only shows her being deficient in something herself
sense or feeling.
Jane Austen
#87. Beauty is an ultimate value - something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
Roger Scruton
#88. Forget your religious superstitions built by cults and learn to love for the sake of humanity."-Stated after hearing a man use religion to justify and warrant hatred of people based on differences put forth by his spiritual beliefs. Oddly enough I happen to be very superstitious myself!
Rickey Russell
#89. Closure is an American lie used to justify revenge. Healing is getting used to the pain, learning to be damaged.
Tim Morrison
#90. You can't justify murder by masking it with a cause.
Steve Rogers
#91. My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#92. Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn't have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#93. Only religion could justify killing an adult with a family because he carried out abortions of unwanted or unhealthy fetuses that don't even have the intelligence of a typical fish.
David Alan Harvey
#94. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Janet Malcolm
#95. So often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is reason for doing it.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#96. The zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.
Malcolm X
#97. [She] had the indefinable charm of someone who said little but thought much. Miss Prim had always felt that such people were at a marked advantage. They never said anything tactless, never spouted nonsense, never had cause to regret their words or justify themselves.
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
#98. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.
Hermann Hesse
#99. People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
Blair Warren
#100. When you're a liar, a person of low moral fortitude, really any explanation you need to be true can be true. Especially if you're smart enough. You can figure out a way to justify anything.
Samuel Witwer
