Top 100 Quotes About Justification
#1. There is no justification without sanctification, no forgiveness without renewal of life, no real faith from which the fruits of new obedience do not grow.
Martin Luther
#2. If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
Friedrich Hayek
#3. If the benefits of Christ's work (justification, reconciliation, adoption, and so on) are abstracted from Christ himself, and the proclamation of the gospel is made in terms of what it offers rather than in terms of Christ himself, the question naturally arises: To whom can I offer these benefits?
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#4. When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
E.L. Doctorow
#5. Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
Steven Erikson
#6. Wherever we've gone around the world, we've found quite significant gaps: the holy texts, no matter which one you turn to, has ambiguity in it around slavery. That, we knew, was being used as justification by slavers all over the world.
Andrew Forrest
#7. This doctrine (justification) is the head and the cornerstone. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour.
Martin Luther
#8. Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don't be upset when others decide you're an asshole.
[Blog post of July 26, 2011]
Jim C. Hines
#9. The usual justification for eating extra meals is that it keeps the metabolism 'revved up' so that weight loss is easier. There is, however, very little hard evidence that supports this idea, and a fair amount that disputes it.
Andrew Weil
#10. When your sin is exposed, you will run toward confession and forgiveness or self-righteousness and self-justification.
Paul David Tripp
#11. Sometimes it's just over and you can't make it all right. Justification by works: an overrated idea.
Salman Rushdie
#12. A person who is seeking to feel justification for some action might move from "What you've done angers me" to "What you've done is wrong." Popular justifications include the moral high ground of righteous indignation and the more simple equation known by its biblical name: an eye for an eye.
Gavin De Becker
#13. When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to "prove" our worth but to live our possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
#14. We give ourselves only to relationships and pursuits that build us up and bolster our efforts at self-justification and self-creation. But this also leads us to disdain and look down on those who do not have the same accomplishments or identity-markers
Timothy Keller
#15. Here seems now no reasonable justification for continuing any civil plutonium program.
Jinzaburo Takagi
#16. the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all - and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.
Rosa Brooks
#17. These irresponsible acts, which cannot have any justification whatsoever, are to be fully condemned. In these appalling circumstances, I want to offer you the most sincere condolences, both in my name and in that of the French people.
Jacques Chirac
#18. Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#19. In sha Allah, God willing, must be the expression of humility of the active actors and it must never be the justification of the passive observers
Tariq Ramadan
#20. I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
Jonathan Sacks
#21. We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols.
Alexander Schmemann
#22. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.
Clayton M Christensen
#23. Justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone.
R.C. Sproul
#24. There's nothing people can't contrive to praise or condemn and find justification for doing so, according to their age and their inclinations.
Moliere
#25. On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction.
Stephen Harper
#26. I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human"
as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.
Jack Henry Abbott
#27. Saving faith is an immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon Him alone, for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of God's grace.
Charles Spurgeon
#28. There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate.
Marilyn Yalom
#29. Self-justification, that was the danger
the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all.
Hugh Nibley
#30. You understood that there was no better thing in the world than to be kissed in the way she was kissing you, that this was without argument the single most important justification for being alive.
Paul Auster
#31. Luther's doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.
Carl R. Trueman
#32. ... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms
Alasdair MacIntyre
#33. Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
P. J. O'Rourke
#34. Criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#35. It could never be a correct justification that, because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, that the blacks must oppress them today because they have power.
Robert Mugabe
#36. What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.
Peter Drucker
#37. Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing.
Daniel Kahneman
#38. Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.
Kristina McMorris
#39. The Universe did not ask for justification before it came into existence.
Fred Van Lente
#40. In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#41. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.
Stanley Kubrick
#42. The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.
Paul Theroux
#43. Those who love him love that he sells the most art; they take it as a point of faith that this proves Kinkade is the best. But his fans don't only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values.
Jerry Saltz
#44. All numbers in logic must be capable of justification. Or rather it must become plain that there are no numbers in logic. There are no pre-eminent numbers.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#45. Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.
Thomm Quackenbush
#46. A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
Anita Brookner
#47. At the heart of the Protestant faith is the conviction that there is nothing we contribute to our salvation but our sin, no merit we bring but Christ's, and nothing necessary for justification except faith alone.
Kevin DeYoung
#48. [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
Ayn Rand
#49. If the unborn is a human person, no justification for abortion is adequate.
Greg Koukl
#50. Every week I preach justification by faith to my people, because every week they forget it.
Martin Luther
#51. Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses. Acts 13:39
Steven D. Mathewson
#52. Love is not a justification for war. Anyone who uses it as such doesn't know squat about being human.
Cecily White
#53. What if your only hope was to get ministry from someone who not only did not owe you any help - but who actually owed you the opposite? What if your only hope was to get free grace from someone who had every justification, based on your relationship to him, to trample you?
Timothy J. Keller
#54. Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.
Bertrand Russell
#55. For the assertion that "There is no God" is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that "There is a God." Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does.
William Lane Craig
#56. One need only admit the premise that public peace of mind is in danger and any action finds justification. All the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France were based entirely on solicitude for public tranquillity.
Leo Tolstoy
#57. For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.
John Maynard Keynes
#58. It is through justification of one's actions that a completely guiltless life is possible.
Ashly Lorenzana
#59. Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.
Richard Dawkins
#60. The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#61. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.
Slavoj Zizek
#62. It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.
Ruth Benedict
#63. The feelings for each of them competing for space in my heart and justification in my mind.
Jordan Deen
#64. A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous).
Jean-Paul Sartre
#65. The reality of the Eucharistic sacrifice has always been at the heart of Catholic faith; called into question in the 16th century, it was solemnly reaffirmed at the Council of Trent against the backdrop of our justification in Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. The history of Protestantism is very great. It presents like no other of Luther's writings the central thought of Christianity, the justification of the sinner for the sake of Christ's merits alone.
Martin Luther
#67. Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana
#68. There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade - a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world - was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries.
Margaret E. Knight
#69. If he gives you the grace to make you believe, he will give you the grace to live a holy life afterward." (Sermon, "Justification by Grace")
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#70. The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.
Richard Russo
#71. If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.
Thomas R. Cech
#72. The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and again by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#73. [Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.
Neil Kinnock
#74. Justification by faith is the key to eliminating racism.
Shai Linne
#75. An excuse is what you make after the deed is done, while a justification is what you offer before.
Brandon Sanderson
#76. Since we have placed justification in the revelation of Jesus Christ formed and brought forth in the heart, there working his works of righteousness and bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit.
Robert Barclay
#77. No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.
John Wesley
#78. Power is when you have every justification to kill someone, and then you don't.
Oskar Schindler
#79. An act of violence against any innocent person eludes moral justification, disgraces the millions of Americans and people throughout the world who have united in peaceful protest against police brutality, and dishonors our proud inheritance of nonviolent resistance.
Benjamin Crump
#80. Of course I wasn't abused. If I were; things would be so simple. I'd have a reason to for being in a shrinks office. I'd have a justification and something to work on. The world wasn't going to give me something that tidy.
Ned Vizzini
#82. I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.
Rich Mullins
#83. The USA FREEDOM Act ends the NSA's unfettered data collection program once and for all, while at the same time preserving the government's ability to obtain information to track down terrorists when it has sufficient justification and support for doing so.
Ted Cruz
#84. If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.
Richard Dawkins
#85. Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#86. The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.
Henry Steele Commager
#87. So teach Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm that cannot be changed.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#88. Let me say this as clearly as I can: No matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.
William J. Clinton
#89. Galen went so far as to assert that no one could be a good doctor unless they were also a philosopher, and he prided himself, with justification, on his own philosophical ability.
Brad Inwood
#90. Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.
Richard Dawkins
#91. The line between faith and fanaticism is a constantly shifting one," Dr. Poblocki said. "When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?
Libba Bray
#92. Growing up learning of distant lands and their bloody histories, Wareska had quickly noticed how pointing to someone else as unquestionably worse was a widely common justification for many atrocities.
Ash Gray
#93. To talk over a quarrel, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-justification, is too much like handling cobwebs to be very successful.
Margaret Deland
#94. Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#95. I've already heard from some military commanders who feel they've been undercut by the vice president of the United States, and there's a lot of justification for their view.
John McCain
#96. Isn't that the justification used by every scientist who made something wonderful, only to discover that they've made something terrible? 'We did it for Science.
Mira Grant
#97. Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.
Richard J. Foster
#98. What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.
William Blum
#99. Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.
Simone De Beauvoir
#100. The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense.
John Alfred Langford
