Quotes About Justifying

#1. As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.

Leo Tolstoy

#2. Meritocracy is a social arrangement like any other: it is a loose set of rules that can be adapted in order to obscure advantages, all the while justifying them on the basis of collective values. pg. 199

Shamus Rahman Khan

#3. Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Ralph Ellison

#4. As Muslims it is our duty to condemn the killings and our duty to ensure that those on the fringe do not shame our community by justifying the killing of innocent people.

Iqbal Sacranie

#5. One of the things I liked about playing Tony Gates in 'Line of Duty' was that I don't think he gave much thought to justifying his actions until he was under investigation.

Lennie James

#6. Reputation is fine but you have to keep justifying it. In a sense, it makes it harder because people's expectations of you are higher. So, you have to fulfill those expectations. Or, try to exceed those expectations. But, it becomes more difficult as time goes on.

Derek Jacobi

#7. The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura.

Carl Schmitt

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. By justifying our harmful negative habits, we live in delusion. We are lying to ourselves. And worse yet, we waste the precious opportunity of living our truth.

Dashama Konah Gordon

#11. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

Margaret Chase Smith

#12. Whether focused on ancestry, visible race, or combinations of the two, systems of ranked difference aimed to separate people into hierarchies of inequality while incorporating them in colonial production, justifying exploitations with claims of essential difference.

John Tutino

#13. I'm not a fan of justifying bad behavior or justifying why people are the way they are. I think that's a cop out. I don't have a lot of empathy for that.

Charlize Theron

#14. The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

Michael Foley

#15. Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person.

Jean Kilbourne

#16. Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

Gordon Allport

#17. Too often we think we can act without explaining and take decisions without justifying them.

Peter Mandelson

#18. God does not require a perfect, sinless life to have fellowship with Him, but He does require that we be serious about holiness, that we grieve over sin in our lives instead of justifying it, and that we earnestly pursue holiness as a way of life.

Jerry Bridges

#19. Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

Thomas Szasz

#20. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

Wendell Berry

#21. Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them

Karen Marie Moning

#22. Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.

Ron Paul

#23. Sensitive people never like the fatigue of justifying their instincts.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#24. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.

Pema Chodron

#25. It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.

Joseph O'Connor

#26. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.

Gregory David Roberts

#27. None but God would ever have thought of justifying me. I am a wonder to myself.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#28. Believing again and again the gospel of God's free justifying grace every day is the hard work we're called to.

Tullian Tchividjian

#29. In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

Azar Nafisi

#30. It almost seems that 'culture' requires aspirants to participate according to their specific qualifications, to become adherents to an immense task of justifying a 'logic' that knows very well how to say practically everything and hardly knows how to listen.

Gemma Corradi Fiumara

#31. You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened ... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.

Tupac Shakur

#32. Two people pass each other. As one looks upon the other's skin color, the other is looking back at their appearance. Both justifying, how better and righteous they are, in their own insecurities.

Anthony Liccione

#33. We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. 'I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through' - well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect.

Michael Fassbender

#34. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

C.S. Lewis

#35. When you hear somebody justifying a war by citing the Almighty, I get a little worried, frankly.

Ron Reagan

#36. Justifying faith implies, not only a divine evidence or conviction that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, but a sure trust and confidence that Christ died for my sins, that He loved me and gave Himself for me.

John Wesley

#37. Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.

Yuri Manin

#38. You are divine, you are perfect, but as an artist, you create your own story and you have the illusion that the story is real. You live your life by justifying that story. And by justifying the story, you are wasting your life.

Miguel Ruiz

#39. Captain, the problem is not that I'm paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.

John Scalzi

#40. Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and "proofs" all their own.

Daniel Goleman

#41. Justifying faith is not a naked assent to the truths of the gospel.

William Gurnall

#42. I'm tired of justifying what I've said.

Jose Canseco

#43. The line, often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the end.

St. Jerome

#44. But let me tell you what happens when regulations go too far, when they seem to exist only for the purpose of justifying the existence of a regulator. It kills the people trying to start a business.

Marco Rubio

#45. None but God would have ever thought of justifying such a man as Saul the persecutor; but the Lord God is glorious in grace.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#46. The ego is a self-justifying historian which seeks only that information that agrees with it, rewrites history when it needs to, and does not even see the evidence that threatens it.

Anthony Greenwald

#47. But he had only received that sort of answer usually given by those who are more obstinate in following their own course, than strong in justifying it.

Walter Scott

#48. Oh my, justifying reasons why
Is an absolutely insane resolution to live by
((Live High))

Jason Mraz

#49. He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

Jack London

#50. The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.

Orhan Pamuk

#51. Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

Fulton J. Sheen

#52. I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know?

Ron Reagan

#53. Many Christians give in to various temptations through peer pressure and find themselves surrendering to worldly passions, justifying pleasures the world offers.

Billy Graham

#54. All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying
a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.

Edward Abbey

#55. I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.

Scott Stossel

#56. The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.

Joel Kramer

#57. It was amazing really, how many of these people used the same rhetoric when justifying themselves.

Mark E. Cooper

#58. A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

Daniel J. Levitin

#59. A true King would not waste time justifying or explaining. He would simply state his will.

Stephen King

#60. Deportation is a decision taken by the home secretary under statute, The new grounds will include fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person's beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence.

Tony Blair

#61. Everything is not black-and-white. I'm really interested in the gray area - not justifying it, not glorifying it, not condoning it, but at least having people see there's a genesis for every event in our lives. There's some divine order to it, whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Isaiah Washington

#62. People who don't believe in God may have their own way of justifying some bad act they have committed.

Lee Greenwood

#63. Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions
rationalizations
justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.

Daniel Goleman

#64. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence.

Young-Ha Kim

#65. He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities.

Miguel Syjuco

#66. The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves
from "justifying" ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#67. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

Fernando Pessoa

#68. A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#69. Man is an angry, savage being. Sometimes faith becomes an excuse for battle. It is no real faith then. In justifying their positions in the name of God, men silence God.

C.J. Sansom

#70. Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A

Rita Mae Brown

#71. Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can't get creative and find alternate solutions if they don't listen to each other. There's a lot of arguing and justifying.

Stephen Covey

#72. Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.

Garry Wills

#73. As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.

Leo Tolstoy

#74. How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

Sylvia Plath

#75. You have behaved in an exemplary manner until now. Even when you could have gained by doing something wrong, you refrained from doing so. You didn't fall prey to the logic of doing a small wrong for the sake of the greater good; of the ends justifying the means. That takes moral courage.

Amish Tripathi

#76. In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.

Leo Tolstoy

#77. Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing

Jean Kilbourne

#78. At the last moment, the fish and I exchange a troubled glance. The murrel seems to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I am in no position to start justifying the unusual treatment. What comes next is a new experience for both the fish and me.

Tahir Shah

#79. Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.

Pema Chodron

#80. I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself.

Joseph Mitchell

#81. As a whole, humanity doesn't lend itself to generalizations. But as I see it, there are two types of people: the comprehensive-vision type and the limited-perspective type. Me, I seem to be the latter. Not that I ever had much problem justifying my limits. A person has to draw lines somewhere.

Haruki Murakami

#82. In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Darin Strauss

#83. Even alone we go on justifying ourselves.

Mason Cooley

#84. I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.

Rita Mae Brown

#85. According to Wesley, God's grace is like a seed planted in human beings. It is the power that leads them to seek God (prevenient grace); it is the power that saves them from sin (justifying grace); and it is the power that leads them to perfection (sanctifying grace).

H. Newton Malony

#86. Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.

Robert E. Davis

#87. Julie gave me a look generally reserved for naughty children and husbands justifying their recent electronics purchase.

Katherine Bayless

#88. Christ came to give us a justifying righteousness, and He also came to make us holy - not chiefly for the purpose of evidencing here our possession of a justifying righteousness - but for the purpose of forming and fitting us for a blessed eternity.

Thomas Chalmers

#89. Don't hold onto negative feelings by justifying why you are right and someone else is wrong.

Deepak Chopra

#90. Obama was particularly offended, as he put it, that "the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval." Justifying

Jeremy Scahill

#91. Because of the Cross, God can be both just towards sin and yet mercifully justifying to sinners.

Timothy Keller

#92. Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

Voltaire

#93. We admit no faith to be justifying, which is not itself and in its own nature a spiritually vital principle of obedience and good works.

John Owen

#94. Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as to the occasion's justifying her coming so far alone. The latter was thinking only of his breakfast.

Jane Austen

#95. The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life, not hesitating to kill a great many of them and justifying this on the grounds that they are being the objects of terrorism, which is true.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#96. These Scriptures, therefore, are infinitely far from justifying the slavery under consideration; for it cannot be made to appear that one in a thousand of these slaves has done any thing to forfeit his own liberty.

Samuel Hopkins

#97. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend
or to keep one.

Robert E.Lee

#98. It isn't always true that a critical end justifies desperate means.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#99. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#100. No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

Theodore Roosevelt