Self Justifying Quotes

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

Daniel Goleman

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Pema Chodron

#7. 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

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

Tullian Tchividjian

#9. 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

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

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#11. 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

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

Joseph O'Connor

#13. 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

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

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#15. 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

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

Karen Marie Moning

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Ron Reagan

#25. 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

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

Yuri Manin

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Jean Kilbourne

#42. 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

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

Robert E.Lee

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

Peter Mandelson

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

Richelle E. Goodrich

#46. 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