Justify Quotes

Justify Quotes by Tim Wise, Manmohan Singh, Russell M. Nelson, Mahmoud Darwish, Norman Finkelstein, Michael J. Knowles and many others.

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been

Here’s the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.
Tim Wise
It is a struggle for the minds of the people… No cause justifies recourse to terrorism.
Manmohan Singh
The temptation to be popular may prioritize public opinion above the word of God. Political campaigns and marketing strategies widely employ public opinion polls to shape their plans. Results of those polls are informative. But they could hardly be used as grounds to justify disobedience to God’s commandments!
Russell M. Nelson
Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
Mahmoud Darwish
No conditions justify torture.
Norman Finkelstein
Speech is not violence. The Left conflates the two in order to justify its own violent reactions to differing points of view.
Michael J. Knowles
The general confusion is that our moral behavior is what justifies us before God. Most of us would never say that with our mouths but we feel that lie in our heart and believe it in our minds. You can be morally upright and not be a worshipper of Christ at all.
Matt Chandler
I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.
Richard Attenborough
What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support, That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. 1 Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.
John Milton
It’s very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
I should say, the one thing you run into is, if you’re trying to raise a round you have to decide, well, how much money are you trying to raise? And then you have to justify that to your investors, because they want to know why you [are] raising that much? Why aren’t you raising either twice as much or half as much?
David Plotz
If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.
Nhat Hanh
I need to create a whole cinematic experience. I think that’s what it takes to get the audience to the theater and justify seeing [a movie] on a big screen. You have to give them a cinematic experience.
Fede Alvarez
…as soon as the war was over, they had to justify what was done.
Harry S. Truman
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
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Henry A. Kissinger
Until the province is willing to look internally at their inflated budget, to engage the private sector, to exhaust every other available avenue, we can’t justify a series of costly new taxes on residents who are already telling us that they just can’t afford it.
Doug Ford
A difficult regional situation doesn’t justify one man’s determination to hold onto power. It’s clear to me that democratization is a very complicated process.
Bidzina Ivanishvili
The first thing to note is that pornography and many abductions occur apart from the use of computers, and that most child abuse happens within the family. So I think the extra degree of danger that computers pose doesn’t justify the frenzy.
Seymour Papert
You can be a victim or you can be rich, but you can’t be both. Listen up! Every time, and I mean every time, you blame, justify, or complain, you are slitting your financial throat.
T. Harv Eker
Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.
Lord Chesterfield
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
Arthur Koestler
The prosperity and advancement of a nation depend upon its intelligentsia, and Muslim India is looking forward to her young generation and education classes to give a bold lead for our guidance and a brilliant record of histrorical achievements and traditions.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
You can try to justify how Asian you are, but you’re never going to make everybody happy.
Henry Golding
And another question was unfortunately not asked of GГ¶ring: ‘The German people put faith in you even if they doubted Hitler because you were gentlemanly and more likable. What did you, GГ¶ring, do to justify this confidence? You have led a luxurious life and collected stolen art.
Hermann Goring
Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
Wendell Berry
I have often wondered whether a person is justified in neglecting his own family to fight for opportunities for others.
Nelson Mandela
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
Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons… provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.
Andre Aciman
Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destory; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.
Farley Mowat
American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I’m sure there are words that are simply in there ’cause I like them. I know I couldn’t justify each and every one of them.
Neil Gaiman
No one justifies lying, cheating, betraying, promise breaking, devastating and harming strangers. But we expect and we tolerate doing this to the one person in the world we promised most seriously to be faithful to forever: we justify divorce.
Peter Kreeft
In ‘Bush v. Gore,’ five justices had a partisan outcome in mind and then made up the judicial principle to justify it, while claiming that the decision would not be precedent for any future cases.
Marvin Ammori
What’s interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature.
Greg Lynn
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
Albert Camus
I choose love. No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness, I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves.
Max Lucado
You feign guilt in order to justify yourself.
Jean Racine
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.
Г“scar Arias
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.
A. E. Housman
To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.
Louis D. Brandeis
Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.
Paul Rusesabagina
The Israelis have suffered a great deal, we must condemn suicide bombers, and we must never say that the plight of the Palestinians justifies this terrible thing.
George Carey
It’s very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It’s very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.
Edward Said
I felt reluctant accepting the very lucrative and easy life Hollywood had offered me. All of it planted a seed: If I could do something about the conditions of the world, I could probably justify my position as an actor.
Sterling Hayden
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
Leon Trotsky
There’s no way you can possibly intellectually justify, ‘Well, it’s okay for the Western Judeo-Christian countries to have nuclear weapons, but not for a country like Iran.’ That logic goes nowhere fast.
Valerie Plame
I’m glad my name stands for the principle that everyone has the right to force the government to justify his imprisonment.
Lakhdar Boumediene
And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That’s what we live with.
Nick Harkaway
The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means … that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.
Benjamin Graham
We are fighting hard against radical Islamic terrorism, and we will prevail. We cannot accept those who reject our values and who use hatred to justify violence against the innocent.
Donald Trump
Through a particular magical practice it is possible to modify the being that has only one element into a being with four elements and to give it an immortal spirit. But a magicial will seldom intervene without good reason, because he is responsible and must justify his actions before Divine Providence.
Franz Bardon
I have to justify my job every day.
Marco Silva
If sophisticated calculations are needed to justify an action, don’t do it.
Robert Heller
I had to go to a mirror and look at it. I couldn’t picture myself in my own head. I had no image beyond a stick figure. I wasn’t a mean person as a kid, or dumb, and something has to be said to justify excluding you.
Uma Thurman
What’s amazing is that so many leaders who value teamwork will tolerate people who aren’t humble. They reluctantly hire self-centred people and then justify it because those people have desired skills.
Patrick Lencioni
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
George Bernard Shaw
We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole. But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.
Paul Klee
I accept that in a free society you have to justify reductions in people’s liberties. I accept that, bearing in mind my starting point is that the most important human right is the right to life.
John Howard
The biggest challenge is not coming up with the stunt, the biggest challenge is designing a sequence around it that sort of justifies its existence.
Christopher McQuarrie
Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.
Gustav Heinemann
We don’t need to justify love; it is there or not there. Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
I fought linotype and montype for some time because it would not justify as well as handset could be made to do; but at last, as always happens, the machine outdid the hand, and got all the best types on it.
George Bernard Shaw
To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, and to save it, if it believes the preaching.
Martin Luther
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
Georges Bernanos
You sell on emotion, but you justify a purchase with logic.
Joseph Sugarman
The end doesn’t justify the means.
Ovid
I still remember my quote from the 2007 World Cup, when I said scoring two threes was as good as hitting a six. That was me trying to justify what you couldn’t. To me, and this was before I became director of cricket, we just couldn’t do that again.
Andrew Strauss
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
It is very hard, if not impossible,” he wrote in his study, “to justify active management for most individual, taxable investors, if their goal is to grow wealth.” And he said that those who still insist on an actively managed fund are almost certainly “deluding themselves.
Mark Hulbert
Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
Louis D. Brandeis
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
Don’t apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.
Walter Darby Bannard
The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects, their wives, their children, their families, their neighbours? How can you justify this?
Imran Khan
Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
Aldous Huxley
In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.
Albert Camus
Love your sport. Never do it to please someone else; it has to be yours. That is all that will justify the hard work. Compete against yourself, not others, for that is who is truly your best competition.
Peggy Fleming
Religion doesn’t make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.
Reza Aslan
Listen. Don’t explain or justify.
Wayne Dyer
That’s the thing you learn about values: they’re what people make up to justify what they did.
Max Barry
There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. […] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.
H. G. Wells
If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.
David Graeber
The only struggle which religions can justify, the only struggle worthy of humans, is the moral struggle against humanity’s own disordered passions, against every kind of selfishness, against attempts to oppress others, against every type of hatred and violence.
Pope John Paul II
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
William Faulkner
I think calling what Paul Ryan is doing a ‘budget’ is lending some validity to it. It is not a budget. If it were a budget, he could justify his revenue projections, he could justify his cuts, and he can’t. This is a scheme to rob the poor and give to the rich.
Marcia Fudge
How could you justify giving Holland twice the amount of money that you gave Belgium? Well, finally, I put it up to them. They said that they couldn’t do it; it would destroy them. I said they had to do it. And I finally got support from Hoffman on it.
W. Averell Harriman
To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re-inscribe the original violation, to re-violate masculine turf.
Nancy K. Miller
For those of you that use YOLO to justify sin: YOLO, you only live once, but then you burn in hell forever.
Nouman Ali Khan
Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
Thomas Sowell
Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.
Carol Tavris
What strategic benefit would accrue from having Montenegro as an ally that would justify the risk of our having to go to war should some neighbor breach Montenegro’s borders?
Pat Buchanan
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
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
A man who is truly humble is not troubled when he is wronged and he says nothing to justify himself against the injustice, but he accepts slander as truth; he does not attempt to persuade men that he is calumniated, but he begs forgiveness.
Isaac of Nineveh
I don’t spend a lot of time judging anyone I play. Even if their function in the script is to be the villain, I concentrate on what their perspective of the events is. Not even to justify them.
Peter Sarsgaard
As an entrepreneur, the latitude of failure and of success is directly correlated to people. I am growing more and more attentive to my first instincts, even if I can’t justify them, as they apply to people.
Caroline Ghosn
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
Charles Baudelaire
In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.
Carol Tavris
If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that success and failure are simple matters of ‘fortune’ or ‘luck,’ then it is easy to promote and justify their various income redistribution schemes.
Neal Boortz
Islam expect every Muslim to do this duty, and if we realise our responsibility time will come soon when we shall justify ourselves worthy of a glorious past.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Nothing can justify war.
Isaac Rosenberg
If the end does not justify the means – what can?
Edward Abbey
The truth is that, though we were justified by faith alone, the faith that justifies is never alone (it always produces fruit, ‘good works,’…a transformed life).
J. I. Packer
Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.
Melissa Farley
You don’t have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.
Garrison Keillor
We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Her existence alone was excuse enough to justify the creation of the entire world.
Stephenie Meyer
September 11th does not justify ignoring the Constitution by creating broad new federal police powers. The rule of law is worthless if we ignore it whenever crises occur.
Ron Paul
I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can’t really justify spending a fortune on food.
Jack Monroe
I really feel like there have been moments of some level of creative nonfiction. I have kind of had to explain or justify some of the timeline and logistics of my life in a way that made sense to others.
Rachel Dolezal
You do not need to justify asking questions. But if you think you have found answers, you do not have the right to remain silent.
Jacob Neusner
Dislike of another’s opinions and beliefs neither justifies our own nor makes us more certain of them: and to transfer the repugnance to the person himself is a mark of a vulgar mind.
John Lancaster Spalding
God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. …History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
Paul Valery
People may hurt you but God will heal you. People may humiliate you but God will honour you. People may judge you but God will justify you.
Nicky Gumbel
If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.
David Horowitz
If something is shocking without being funny it’s hard to justify.
Seth MacFarlane
One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.
Ken Livingstone
The idea of any social obligation … just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it’s since the day before that I worry, and don’t sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
Fernando Pessoa
Let women write horror. Let women write darkness, let women write trauma, without having to carve out their own trauma to justify it.
Leigh Bardugo
Whatever your beliefs are, you do not have to justify them to others.
Alexandra Stoddard
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Stephen Vizinczey
Some people need a theology of an angry God to justify their anger against sinners.
Bill Johnson
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless – until they aren’t.
Amy Waldman
There are things that have to be done and you do them and you don’t talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget them.
Mario Puzo
I have a lot of love for the resilience personified in so many achievements made by Americans. I feel not American when that idea of resilience is appropriated to justify discrimination, e.g., “Make America Great Again.”
Tavi Gevinson
I never think the ends justify the means.
Zal Batmanglij
The nature of the hybrid research/design model means that we often can see design efforts as attempts not to concretize the outcomes of research but instead to justify, promote, or initiate them
Paul Dourish
The U.S. has perverted the U.N. weapons process by using it as a tool to justify military actions, falsely so. … The U.S. was using the inspection process as a trigger for war.
Scott Ritter
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
To attempt to enumerate the complicated variety of mischiefs in the whole system of the social economy, which proceed from a neglect of the maxims that uphold public credit, and justify the solicitude manifested by the House on this point, would be an improper intrusion on their time and patience.
Alexander Hamilton
What we once thought of as necessary and proper reasons for ostracizing and marginalizing gay people, we now understand do not justify that kind of oppression.
Donald Verrilli Jr.
Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices…rather than to root them out.
Mary Wollstonecraft
And I don’t like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don’t car how careful you are, they’re just plain messy. I can’t believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.
Erin McKean
Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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
Suppose you were a real estate investor with a 1/3 interest in the best apartment complex in town, the best mall, and the best office building. Would you feel like a poor, undiversified investor? No! But as soon as you get into stocks, people feel this way. Partly, people need to justify their fees.
Charlie Munger
Feelings of bitterness and dissatisfaction feed upon themselves and give place to thoughts and acts of unkindness, criticism, and eventually even hatred. Criticism is often motivated by a desire to rationalize one’s own shortcomings and to justify termination of sacred marriage covenants.
Richard G. Scott
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
In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.
Abe Fortas
You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, ‘Things happen for a reason’, there’s a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way
Martin Landau
It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so…useless?
Matthew Zapruder
It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone.
John Calvin
A Code of Honor: Never approach a friend’s girlfriend or wife with mischief as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she’s really attractive.
Bruce Jay Friedman
The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.
John Dewey
I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.
Osmel Sousa
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.
Ted Koppel
When you loot or behave violently, you give grounds to those that try to justify illegal police abuse. You become the poster child for them to say, ‘See, we have no choice but to shoot and kill, or use a chokehold, because just look at the way they behave.’
Al Sharpton
Michael Bradley has the stuff of leadership; he works hard and can break up the opponent’s play. However, that’s not enough to justify his philanthropic attitude towards possession, the generous portion of balls that he contributes to his foes. His sloppiness constantly culminates in unnecessary goals.
Franklin Foer
By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.
Carl Sagan
To leave in search of yourself, of your real needs, is easier when you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone, when there are not too many people bestowing you their attention.
Isabelle Adjani
The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.
Mercedes Lackey
As an actor, I should justify the role given to me. So, as a villain, my job was to make people hate me.
Ranjeet
What I want is for people to be treated better, to be paid better, and when you start doing something simple , it forces your price point up, which means that you have to produce a higher quality product in order to justify that.
Ted Genoways
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
Noam Chomsky
It is well worth the efforts of a lifetime to have attained knowledge which justifies an attack on the root of all evil … which asserts that because forms of evil have always existed in society, therefore they must always exist.
Elizabeth Blackwell
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours.
Albert Camus
The ends must justify the means.
Matthew Prior
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
Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. The more diversified our labors and interests have become in the modern world, the more surely need to integrate our efforts to justify our individual selves and our civilization.
Walt Disney
Everybody can justify their actions. We all think that we’re doing things for reasons that are meaningful to us. Maybe not to other people, but to us.
Barbara Crampton
Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I feel that I deserve to hear just some words to justify the actions of an organization that I have honored and promoted every day of my nearly 30-year existence in it.
Mookie Wilson
A mother is willing and capable of doing anything for her children. You can justify it if you do something for your children, especially as a Mexican mother. I don’t know about some other nationalities, but the Mexican mothers are like that. They will do anything for their children.
Salma Hayek
So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster.
Kent Conrad
The ends justify the means mindset has been the impetus behind many a cruel medical or social experiment.
James Morcan
Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?
Michael Dorris
When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.
Maajid Nawaz
Justify, you can walk up to him and he might give you three, four, five seconds and then he’s done with you. He’ll try to bite your head off. It’s not in a mean way. He’s just a big, tough horse. He’ll run you out of the stall.
Bob Baffert
The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.
Benjamin Constant
It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.
Morris Raphael Cohen
The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.
Sebastian Fitzek
I have had vegan Thanksgiving of tofurkey and soy gravy. And it’s not to say that Thanksgiving will ever justify the genocide of the Native Americans. But vegan Thanksgiving – that’s just spitting on the graves, isn’t it?
Hari Kondabolu
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Milan Kundera
The end doesn’t justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
Nick Harkaway
The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it.
Justin Cartwright
I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.
Martin Landau
When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don’t try to get a result but try to get an understanding for the next time you go to them.
Henry A. Kissinger
[ Massachusetts constitution] was [John Adams] attempt to justify that structure by the traditional notion of social estates – that the executive represented the monarchical estate, the senate the aristocratic estate, and the house of representatives the estate of the people.
Gordon S. Wood
I don’t have to justify myself. I work a lot and I earn a lot.
Ksenia Sobchak
The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
Ben Kingsley
The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.
David Olusoga
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
When I see people with an interesting gap year, if they can explain it, if they can justify it, if they can show what they’ve learnt from it, it’s sometimes more profitable or more intelligent than having been through a traditional, continuous race from high school to the end of university.
Jean-Pascal Tricoire
But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps’ use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.
Ron Kind
The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.
Dallas Willard
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
Alfred North Whitehead
We are able to persevere only because God works within us, within our free wills. And because God is at work in us, we are certain to persevere. The decrees of God concerning election are immutable. They do not change, because He does not change. All whom He justifies He glorifies. None of the elect has ever been lost.
R. C. Sproul
Whether I lead or not, as a top order batsman I feel people expect a lot from me. I also expect that I do get runs and justify my place in the side as a top order batsman.
Mithali Raj
Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product.
Mircea Eliade
It’s much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it’s some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.
Henry Giroux
If the ends don’t justify the means, then what does?
Robert Moses
How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion’s aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.
Coco Rocha
Оџur own distrust somewhat justifies the deceit of others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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
People don’t want to have to justify their privileges; they don’t want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.
Jamie Johnson
One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
Albert Einstein
What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.
Thomas Cranmer
I change clothes at least three times a day. It’s the only way I can justify all the shopping I do. Prada to the grocery store? Yes! Gucci to the dry cleaner’s? Why not? Dolce & Gabbana to the corner deli? I insist!
RuPaul
You must have the music to justify an instrument’s extensive use.
Steve Lacy
O call not me to justify the wrong, That thy unkindness lays upon my heart, Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue, Use power with power, and slay me not by art.
William Shakespeare
A lot of people like to justify women’s supporting role in sports media by saying, ‘Well, they’ve never played the game, so they just aren’t qualified to speak about it.’
Katie Nolan
It’s very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It’s very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers. These actions were taken with the support and financing of the United States.
Edward Said
I just don’t understand, if they see numbers [of CEO salaries]that represent people, how they can somehow skirt around that and morally justify taking or ruining those lives and leaving them with nothing. That, to me, is violent crime. It’s certainly more violent than selling grams of pot to other adults.
Eddie Vedder
How is Maggie Rowe compensating for her decision to not have a child? Is what she is doing instead enough to justify that decision? What is she doing instead, and why can’t she be better at it? What’s keeping her from getting a better overall existence score in comparison to an arbitrary sampling of other human beings?
Maggie Rowe
Everyone makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt someone else along the way – and whether or not the means justify the ends. And that, to me, is universal.
George Clooney
When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo – symmetry, or color, or contrast – and it’s my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.
Connor Franta
I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways.
Thomas Heatherwick
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
The rich and powerful want to believe in their right to be rich and powerful, so they justify it by saying they are inherently superior to the poor and lowly.
Gwen Bristow
Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.
Fulton J. Sheen
Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.
Richard Whately
You know, we’re each the hero of our own story and we perceive what’s going on around us, and especially in a relationship, from the kind of viewpoint of, ‘Well, this is my story, and I’m the hero of that, and I justify what I do around it.’
Michael Sheen
There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
Aldrich Ames
Time often serves to justify a deed which seems at first unjustifiable.
Donald P. Ryan
Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.
Max Stirner
I don’t think you need to justify faith, faith is its own justification.
Richard Coles
Slaveholders deployed so-called scientific racism to justify racial slavery.
Manisha Sinha
I’m not an apologist for Iran’s actions. Iran certainly has supported activities of terrorism, and the Houthis don’t have clean hands. The Houthis have engaged in crimes too. But the idea that that justifies American involvement in a civil war in Yemen doesn’t make any sense strategically.
Ro Khanna
The desire to be rewarded for one’s creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
Richard Stallman
We are making it very clear to all countries that nothing justifies terrorism. There are no political reasons that justify it; there is no cause, no grievance that justifies it. And we will do everything possible to make sure that all countries of the world understand that.
Antonio Guterres
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism – the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success – actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.
Michelle Alexander
I’m offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.
Moby
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
It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
Louis D. Brandeis
It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.
Samuel Rutherford
Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.
Matt Taibbi
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
Excuses are used to justify leaving the scene of truth without changing.
Orrin Woodward
Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
Henry Seidel Canby
But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
Life, woman, life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.
Arthur Miller
Human beings will justify anything.
Alycia Debnam-Carey
Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK’s GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.
Edward Snowden
I’m avoiding having an assistant because then I would become the horrible boss. I can’t justify having an assistant as a 25-year-old; I just can’t do it!
John Francis Daley
There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Eric Hoffer
Everybody has a capacity for a happy life. All these talks about how difficult times we live in, that’s just a clever way to justify fear and laziness.
Lev Landau
I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.
Arthur Conan Doyle
How can I justify the Cuban Adjustment Act when there are people coming from Cuba saying that they come – that they have – that they should be treated differently from other migrants? But they’re going back to that country.
Marco Rubio
I jump at every opportunity I get to do something new but only if I feel that I can justify it.
Jubin Nautiyal
Please choose the way of peace.. In the short term there may be winners and losers in this war that we all dread. But that never can, nor never will justify the suffering, pain and loss of life your weapons will cause.
Mother Teresa
Your policy should be a mixture between your interests and how you reach your ends, but based on values. It cannot be only the end justifies the means, because for the criminals, ends justify the means, for thieves, for every illegal and immoral action, the end justifies the means.
Bashar al-Assad
It is the work of God alone to justify, to sanctify, and to glorify.
John Wesley
I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.
Rem Koolhaas
A four-year-old should have no self-esteem, and for good reason. What could he have possibly accomplished in his life to justify esteeming oneself so highly?
Steven Crowder
Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify.
Francis Picabia
That fact is that we live in an extremely violent culture, and we all justify violence if it’s for what we believe in .
Paul Watson
Rohit Shetty liked my acting in the movie ‘Theeran,’ which released in 2017. He believed that I would justify the role of a baddie in ‘Sooryavanshi.’
Abhimanyu Singh
The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse.
Bertrand Russell
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
Albert Camus
When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.
Nelson Mandela
In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire.
Tracy K. Smith
We cannot justify ourselves in living by that particular part of the word that appeals to us, the part that we desire to obey, but must be willing to. . . live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Albert E. Bowen
Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.
Dag Hammarskjold
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
Michael Dyson is popular amongst most blacks because he uses his pedestal as an ‘educated’ man to justify blacks’ rage and hatred and never demands that blacks take responsibility for themselves and their own failures and character flaws.
Jesse Lee Peterson
Furniture manufacturing in plastics requires very costly machinery, which the Danish market is not big enough to justify. Or so they say. But show me a plastics manufacturer who dares to take on the experiment
Arne Jacobsen
Success in one role can’t justify failure in another.
Stephen Covey
In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.
Richard Dawkins
The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church.
John Shelby Spong
We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.
Frans de Waal
Simply put, Guantanamo is one of the best propaganda tools that terrorists have today. Our enemies use it to justify terrorism and recruit others to carry out violent jihad, and our allies continue to criticize it as a violation of the rule of law.
Dianne Feinstein
One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.
Jane Smiley
I think it’s really difficult to justify converting a film that wasn’t shot in 3-D into 3-D. I really do believe, as does James Cameron and all the people who are actually pro-3-D, that you have to go out and shoot it that way. You have nothing but compromise if you don’t.
David Slade
We need a feminist movement that is robust enough to survive women who have preyed on others without trying to justify their behavior or maligning their victims.
Bari Weiss
The world, the wise world, that never is wrong itself, judges always by events. And if he should use me ill, then I shall be blamed for trusting him: if well, O then I did right, to be sure!–But how would my censurers act in my case, before the event justifies or condemns the action, is the question.
Samuel Richardson
I want to believe in a personal god who looks after me and my loved ones and knows every sparrow that falls. But the suffering of one single child, or more likely, millions is evidence against that belief. The one question I want to ask god: how do you explain or justify the suffering of a child?
Melina Mercouri
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
Jean-Luc Godard
Our knowledge of animals and their behaviour has come a long way. We can no longer justify imprisoning them, robbing them of everything that is natural and important to them and turning them into objects of ridicule for our amusement.
Ann Widdecombe
I think comedy directors tend to feel a need to justify the bad behavior, and I just never think that. I like bad behavior, I’ve always liked bad behavior, I’m a fan of bad behavior, and I don’t think you have to justify bad behavior.
Todd Phillips
I feel worn down as a human being who has to constantly justify their existence to other human beings because I’m a minority
Killer Mike
I feel like I’m always having to justify why I haven’t kept in touch with anyone from the old days in Stoke-on-Trent, but I’m like that with anybody. I don’t let anybody in. I just rely on myself.
Robbie Williams
I do think faith is important when it introduces positivity into your life and you see it with love in your heart because there’s so many people who unfortunately use faith for detrimental things or to justify detrimental actions.
Nazanin Boniadi
I go to my office nearly every day, and I’ll sit there for six or seven hours and come up with ideas, and that’s the only way I can justify turning up on stage.
Sean Lock
There will be people who don’t like you or aren’t convinced. I’d rather let my work talk than justify in words.
Sidharth Malhotra
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
I stand by the stuff I say, even the really stupid stuff. I’ll find a way to justify it.
Blake Shelton
Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin, all hope consists in confession; in confession there is a chance for mercy.
Isidore of Seville
More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.
Rudyard Kipling
Most software has a tiny essence that justifies its existence, everything after that is wants and desires mistaken for needs and necessities.
David Heinemeier Hansson
It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.
John Calvin
Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment.
Barack Obama
You really can’t justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.
Dallas Willard
It’s such a phenomenon for a hip-hop artist to fully embrace his Christian roots and his faith. And that becomes something that people almost need you to justify.
LeCrae
Congress often covers the exposed crotch of our human spaceflight program with the figleaf of science when it’s an obvious lie to justify the pumping of billions of dollars into the belly of an ever-voracious aerospace industrial complex. And yes, of course space is dangerous.
Rick Tumlinson
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.
Jonathan Safran Foer
A half century ago Herbert Wechsler could justify the legal right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the “universal judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims.” That is not a universal judgment today.
Don Kates
What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don’t get impatient in the theatre.
Stephen Sondheim
The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life – involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.
Talcott Parsons
It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.
Thomas Huxley
If God gives you gifts you must use them to justify your life. It is what the Greeks called divine discontent that drives you.
Mary Fairfax
It may be objected, that I am now recommending dissimulation to you; I both own and justify it. It has been long said: Qui nescitdissimular nescit regnare: I go still farther, and say, that without some dissimulation, no business can be carried on at all.
Lord Chesterfield
Almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And, if the court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.
Cass Sunstein
Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.
A. E. Housman
Hate Story’ is about power of women and I feel her bare back poster with a gun justifies it.
Vivek Agnihotri
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
Albert Camus
I never justify, sustain, or in any way or to any extent uphold this cruel, heartless, aimless unnecessary war.
Franklin Pierce
The thing I will say is that probably culturally, women are treated differently, which means, I think, you’re criticized more, you have to listen a little bit more, you have to justify yourself.
Lisa Randall
Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.
Marshall Goldsmith
War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington – not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Poetry is not the language we live in. It’s not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn’t the language to which commercial value has been assigned.
Tracy K. Smith
I would love for [Jesus] to come back because I would love for him to face what is happening and to really have some sort of perspective. In that same respect, I’m sure that Prophet Muhammad would be disgusted by what some people use his name to justify.
Immortal Technique
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
Like all independent movies, the first thing you’re looking for is a name actor who will justify your financing.
Steven Shainberg
The primary battle which religion must fight today is the battle to justify its own existence.
Georgia Harkness
In the wake of 9/11, we were desperate to bring those responsible for the brutal attacks to justice. But even that urgency did not justify torture. The United States must be held to a higher standard than our enemies, yet some of our actions did not clear that bar.
Dianne Feinstein
‘Peter Pan’ is a beloved property. It’s a property that was brought to the screen many, many times before, so one has to not only justify the reasons why one might make a ‘Peter Pan’ movie in 2018, 2019 or whatever, but you also have to do justice to the source material.
David Lowery
I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don’t like cynical people. I don’t like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to fight for it.
Michel Gondry
War justifies everything.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Give God the margin of eternity to justify Himself in, and the more we live and know of our own souls and of spiritual experience generally, the more we shall be convinced that we have to do with one who is good and just.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
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
No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens… spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.
Guy Debord
It’s nice just to be able to go out and, basically, be able to play other types of music and not have any pressure to almost explain it and justify why you did. I just do it because I like to have some fun.
Joe Bonamassa
You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?
Saul Alinsky
It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.
N. T. Wright
All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?
Edward Abbey
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
John Berger
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
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
Oscar Wilde
Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say “No, I don’t go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing.”
Sylvia Plath
You don’t need to justify your love, you don’t need to explain your love, you just need to practice your love. Practice creates the master.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
Thomas Jefferson
I do not pretend that I have led a blameless life, or that one fault justifies another, but the public in judging a case like mine should remember that the darkest life may have a bright side…
Ned Kelly
Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one’s nerve.
Stefan Collini
But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’ Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.
Donna Tartt
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Margaret Atwood
The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only ‘with the greatest reluctance’.
Raymond P. Shafer
Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it … It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.
Daniel Webster
If I am here it is because the club believes in my job and it is my obligation to justify the quality of my job.
Marco Silva
I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
Elie Wiesel
When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men’s first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice
Ayn Rand
I have never heard a doping offender say he felt good about doing it. Not a single one. Some athletes justify their actions by saying it enabled them to afford a bigger house or a better car. But they are never really happy. They know that they are not real winners.
Travis Tygart
While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.
Ben Shapiro
How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We’re supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.
Roger Stone
Religion, it stops people from thinking because they think all the answers are in that one book; it impedes progress; it justifies crazy people. Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.
Bill Maher
My work has always been the thing that justifies my life.
Federico Fellini
The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantanamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts.
Noah Feldman
People … have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
William Faulkner
When I write, I actually hear the characters speak. Almost like an actor – even though I’m not an actor at all – getting into their truth and to justify what they do.
Kareem Mortimer
If it’s anything that’s going to result in suffering to animals or people, then I don’t think [the end] justifies the means… Yeah; but then again if you could hurt ten people to save 100 people and there was no option, what would you do? I can’t really address that.
Ingrid Newkirk
I daresay one good concert justifies a week of satisfaction at home.
Robert Plant
Research consistently shows that the risks to health outweigh the benefits of drinking alcohol. My argument is that the benefits to my mental health justify the risks.
Graeme Simsion
If it’s not coming from your heart and if you don’t believe it, then more than likely you’re not going to be able to bring yourself to performances that justify playing.
Todd Cantwell
Faith is a very clever concept. We invented God from our imagination and we use faith to justify His absence from reality.
C. J. Anderson
The facts of the fossil record never justified denying poor people a healthy diet. The facts of the weather record do not justify denying poor people affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists – or anyone else, for that matter – the right to free speech.
Robert Zubrin
war is a ferocious form of insanity. Nothing can justify it.
Corra May Harris
Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.
Michel Foucault
You can never really justify wages in the entertainment business, but it is what it is.
Gary Lineker
I think comedy can be a way of sugar-coating a pill that needs to be taken, and whatever I complain about onstage, I hope I justify the negativity by using humour to make the point.
Jon Richardson
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
What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?
Helen Keller
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Huxley
Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.
Leo Tolstoy
My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.
Norman Finkelstein
Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means can justify … a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence.
Thomas Jefferson
People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.
Desmond Tutu
As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.
Joyce Meyer
Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully
as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.
Sylvia Plath
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
A lot of people ask me, ‘Are you going to do a sequel to ‘The Guest’ or ‘You’re Next?’ – those movies weren’t financially viable, so even though there are a lot of fans of it, it’d be a pretty small market we’d be appealing to. It’s got to be a big hit for you to really justify that.
Adam Wingard
There is much to justify Turkey’s reverence for Ataturk. He is the force that allowed Turkey to rise from the ashes of defeat and emerge as a vibrant new nation.
Stephen Kinzer
Coffee justifies the existence of the word ‘aroma’.
Glen Duncan
Many feel that in today’s climate some of those in authority are exercising, in effect, a self-serving, ‘ends justify the means’ mindset as well, and that, in turn, empowers them to do the same.
Martin Luther King III
Gone are the days when you could lie on a beach between races and still be in good enough shape to compete. Gone are the days when simply wearing a brand on your firesuit was enough to justify the marketing expense of an Indy Car. Racing an Indy Car is only about a quarter of my life as a racing driver.
Charlie Kimball
Doing a musical is not just acting. It’s total theater. When you have to justify the enormous projection of energy it takes to just go into song and dance, you realized why it’s such a humbling experience every time you go into a show.
Donna McKechnie
It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media.
Bill Mumy
Moving to 100 percent renewable energy means we no longer need and can no longer justify wars for oil.
Jill Stein
The hour when you say, “What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Much of human progress has been in defiance of religion or of the apparent natural order. The defiance of religious and secular authority has led to democracy, human rights, and the protection of the environment. Humanists make no apologies for this. Humanists twist no biblical doctrine to justify such actions.
Fred Edwords
The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don’t be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.
Robert Greene
The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.
Tony Blair
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
Joan Didion
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don’t seem to justify the efforts we make each day.
Robert Adams
As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life’s work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.
Mona Eltahawy
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
The artist’s imagination may wander far from nature. But as long as it is a living, moving power in his brain, isn’t it just as real as any other natural phenomenon? The artist justifies his existence only when he can transform his imagination into truth.
Bill Vaughan
no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.
Karl Popper
What does it say about a president’s policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record?
Mitt Romney
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
Jonathan Safran Foer
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.
George Bernard Shaw
People think rationally that the world really is more risky. Imagine in 2008 that investors thought there was a 10% chance we’d have a depression. That would partly justify the drop in prices.
Eugene Fama
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
Anthony Kennedy
I think there’s a preoccupation with the American market to make excuses and justify its past. If it isn’t current, it means somebody has to make an excuse for it. If it’s ‘cult,’ it gives it a sense of illegitimate legitimacy.
Leon Redbone
The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.
Samuel P. Huntington
Intelligence reports say Castro is very worried about me. I’m very worried that we can’t come up with something to justify his worrying.
Ronald Reagan
Homicide’s illegal and death is the penalty
What justifies the homicide when he dies?
Masta Killa
As an actor, the ambition is to play interesting characters. And in the indie genre world, the budgets are low. That allows me, as an actor, not to have a financial value behind my name, to justify me being in these bigger parts for these types of movies.
A. J. Bowen
I’m not supporting nor not supporting TV casting shows – there is no doubt they are created for financial reasons – but I don’t have a problem with wanting to sell tickets, and if you want to do an arena version of a rock musical, you have to sell a lot of tickets to justify the cast.
Tim Minchin
I see is that there are many people who destroy their marriages because of one-night stands with someone else. And as the French say, “C’est ne pas grave.” It’s not something easy to swallow, but at the same time, it does not justify you to end a long-lasting relationship because something happened.
Paulo Coelho
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
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
Abraham Lincoln
The State may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.
Warren E. Burger
All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn’t save anything or anyone, it doesn’t justify. But it’s a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Russian Federation’s practice of instant citizenship, whereby Russian passports are distributed willy-nilly to ethnic Russians abroad so they can be ‘protected’ in their current homeland, is unacceptable. Passports are travel documents, not a tool to justify aggression.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
The reason I’m uncomfortable with celebrity and don’t care about it is that none of that matters. I think that’s why people attack me and think I’m arrogant. I’ve never felt the need to justify myself. If I make good music, that music will do the job for me, even when I’m dead and gone.
Mick Hucknall
The most insidious of sophisms are usually repeated to justify immodesty and seem to be the same everywhere.
Pope Pius XII
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes them strive to justify themselves. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts their sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
Dale Carnegie
Being honest when you’re dealing with others is easier to do because your honesty is on the table for all to view…Being honest with yourself is more difficult because you only have to justify it in private where no one can see it.
Jeffrey Gitomer
I think we need to ask serious questions about how we engage militarily, when we engage militarily, and on what basis we engage militarily. What kind of intelligence do we have to justify a military engagement?
Albert Wynn
I want it to be more universal than that – like a painter doesn’t have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.
Beth Orton
Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?
Wilfred Burchett
It’s very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It’s not just because they are evil, but because that’s how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It’s always interesting figuring out how that happens.
Zeljko Ivanek
He that has once concluded it lawful to resist power, when it wants merit, will soon find a want of merit, to justify his resistance to power.
Samuel Johnson
Some people maybe try to justify their laziness. You take out what you put in and the more I go to church and the more I turn myself over to the process of believing in Jesus, and to listening to his word and have him guide my hand I feel the pressure’s off me.
Sylvester Stallone
I really hate to be put in the position of trying to justify something, a decision that was made. I’m a military guy: when a decision is made, I go along with it, whatever the manufactured controversy and criticism.
Buzz Aldrin
If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits
Ruth Benedict
You can easily justify to anyone about the need to keep supporting Israel. We get very generous support. We need it.
Ehud Barak
Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.
Jonah Goldberg
If the end is right, it justifies the beans!
Stephen Sondheim
Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.
Henry Fielding
Homosexuality is a cage in which you are trapped in an endless cycle of constantly wanting more – sexually – that you can never actually receive, constantly full of emptiness, trying to justify your twisted actions by politics and ‘feel good’ language.
Michael Glatze
That’s one of the things I find really bad, is when people not only do injuries to others, but then lie about the others to justify it. It’s not bad enough just being bad to someone, but then lying about it.
Whit Stillman
I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.
W. E. B. Du Bois
The end does not justify the means. If we try to be someone we are not in order to achieve a result, then the result cannot help but be something other than what we intended.
Marianne Williamson
The sense of crisis is everything for Trump – even if it’s largely invented. His depiction of darkness justifies his candidacy, the need to violently shake the system. His ability to conjure fear is what distinguished him from all those career pols he has vanquished. And it suits his ego.
Franklin Foer
It is a ludicrous statistic plucked out of the air and used to justify a quite appalling attack on many of the poorest people in this country.
Jeremy Corbyn
He also keeps his silence when Bible passages become shredded to justify unwinding, and kids start to see the face of God in the fragments.
Neal Shusterman
The only works of righteousness that serve to justify a sinner are the works of Christ.
R. C. Sproul
I don’t have to justify my behaviour.
Dimitri Payet
Leo Tolstoy … defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.
Emma Goldman
My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.
Norman Finkelstein
It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.
Gavyn Davies
Is this money well spent? This is taxpayer money, it is going to be adding to the deficit short term and if we can’t justify it, then we’re not going to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, just to make somebody happy, if it’s not good for the economy.
Barack Obama
Vladimir Putin has to create foreign enemies, and he also has to justify… he has to claim… he can’t acknowledge that there’s a legitimate protest against his authoritarian rule, so he’s got to blame it on Hilary Clinton.
Bill Browder
I don’t care whether it was once sacred or not, I HATE WHAT I DO. It’s destroying my soul, making me lose touch with myself, teaching me that pain is a reward, that money buys everything and justifies everything.
Paulo Coelho
I really like not having to justify my decisions to anyone else, as well as the freedom to vacation whenever I want.
James Holzhauer
If you take Darwin’s theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.
Kirk Cameron
Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they’re all loathsome.
Mark Waid
Even for the world’s only superpower, the ends don’t always justify the means.
Jimmy Carter
The viciousness, the lack of rules, is so absolute within the leftist framework that the ends justify the means, that my media is very much organized to try and go toe-to-toe with those people to say we know what your motivations are, we know how vicious you are, but we are not afraid of you.
Andrew Breitbart
Approaches to determining stock values vary, but fundamentally, each company judging itself undervalued is saying that its future stream of earnings justifies a higher price than the stock market is willing to accord it.
Carol Loomis
Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.
Robert Pinsky
And any declaration of faith that does not result in a changed life and good works is a false declaration. It is faith alone that justifies. But faith that justifies can never be alone.
Greg Laurie
If a trip is worth taking, members of Congress should be prepared to justify paying for it out of their office accounts.
Russ Feingold
Pause now to ask yourself the following question: ‘Am I dreaming or awake, right now?’ Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.
Stephen LaBerge
It doesn’t mean you can’t discuss important things, but I would never do a joke about cancer, just because I don’t think any joke is funny enough to justify upsetting someone who is going through that.
Jon Richardson
I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can’t be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn’t justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.
Gloria Steinem
Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Bertrand Russell
Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified?
Timothy Keller
Understand the causes of terror? Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could
Tony Blair
Most Christians with bitterness have a need to justify their sin. They usually do so with virtuous names for the sin like discernment, wisdom, etc. They attract people with complaints as it confirms their “discernment.
Bill Johnson
I … express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow-men.
Michael Faraday
Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.
James D. Watson
How, then, can the feds justify favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World War II or Vietnam?
Pat Buchanan
Big minds have big ideas. Small minds use big ideas to justify bad ideas.
Walter Darby Bannard
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.
Abraham Lincoln
There’s always been some moron-who usually went by the name of ‘producer’ – who would have to justify his existence, and interfere.
Frank Tashlin
I’m pretty sure there’s no sexuality that justifies constant low-level harassment.
Mallory Ortberg
I woke up one day and thought: ‘I want to write a book about the history of my body.’ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.
Byron White
We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.
Don Henley
I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, because I took them one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, “My God! I love everything.” Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our country… How are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realize that we’re all one?
Bill Hicks
I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man: who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.
Richard Attenborough
In a sense, you’re always mythologizing your life; it’s always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your “epicness.” But when you’re writing a memoir, you’re trying to make your life epic and it’s not – nobody’s life is.
Sherman Alexie
To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.
T. S. Eliot
What a crazy coincidence that the teaching of Christ sees to be so compatible with late-era capitalism, suburban isolation, rampant consumerism. And so I am not ever surprised when I see evangelicals contort themselves to justify supporting Donald Trump.
Josh Tillman
I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It’s what’s between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.
Jason Mraz
A lot of actors say that no villain wants to be a villain, generally. They don’t might being evil, maybe, but they have an agenda that they can justify. Otherwise, a little bit of that tension goes, if you’re just a villain and everyone hates you because you’re mean.
Liam McIntyre
Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.
Steve Martin
See how ye Pharisee in the Temple stands,
And justifies himself with lifted hands.
Whilst ye poor publican with downcast eyes,
Conscious of guilt to God for mercy cries.
John Bunyan
I don’t know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.
Geena Davis
Now you know how I justify my addictions—if I can pay less for it than I would at Wal-Mart, I get to have it.
Karen Marie Moning
To justify our likes and dislikes, we generally say that the work we dislike is not serious.
Walter Sickert
Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
Leon Kass
It’s not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it’s the temperament first.
Susan Sontag
I don’t like memoirs. I think they’re self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.
Sally Mann
If society will adopt the rule of nature, and justify no marriage without a supreme affection, the evils of marriage without love will be sufficiently cured. Those who marry without the consent of Nature may securely expect trouble.
Joseph Cook
Anne of Austria (with great submission to a Crowned Head do I say it) was a B—-. She had spirit and courage without parts, devotion without common morality, and lewdness without tenderness either to justify or to dignify it. Her two sons were no more Lewis the Thirteen’s than they were mine.
Lord Chesterfield
I totally reject and have rejected throughout my entire career the proposition that the end justifies the means or that a judge should decide cases based on a desire to reach a certain outcome.
Amy Coney Barrett
And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
I just can’t take anyone who tries to justify a comment using foul language.
Divya Agarwal
If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to that third chapter, and the third chapter is what justifies what’s come before.
Peter Jackson
Our ability to turn off empathy for specific kinds of humans and then use faulty logic to justify our beliefs is messily sociopathic.
Eden Robinson
Most of the time, those who use animals in experiments justify that use by pointing to alleged benefits to human and animal health and the supposed necessity of using animals to obtain those benefits.
Gary L. Francione
If I ever called myself an activist, I regret it, and I was cornered into it by an industry who couldn’t justify me taking up space without saying that I had some kind of radical political agenda because they saw my participation as a radical political thing. Which it was not.
Hari Nef
In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Unless and until it can be proven that an unborn child is not a living human being, can we justify assuming without proof that it isn’t? No one has yet offered such proof; indeed, all the evidence is to the contrary.
Ronald Reagan
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edward Said
You are 100% emotional in everything you think, feel and decide. You decide emotionally and justify logically.
Brian Tracy
Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty? Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify it’s existence? I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods.
Neale Donald Walsch
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
You don’t need to ever justify the way you feel.
Lili Reinhart
One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don’t justify them, become bitter.
Olive Schreiner
I don’t think there’s anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.
Edward Snowden
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
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
The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it
Mark Twain
Gentlemen, I fervently trust that before long the principle of arbitration may win such confidence as to justify its extension to a wider field of international differences.
Henry Campbell-Bannerman
That’s when civil liberty suffers – when we think special times justify the diminution of civil liberties. And I’m not going to accept that.
Alan Dershowitz
Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it’s dangerous when you use it to justify answers.
Martin Fowler
To justify God’s ways to man.
A. E. Housman
The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.
Penn Jillette
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
Albert Camus
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing… The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.
Paulo Freire
If we agree to say that those terrorists are indeed Muslim, I have no problem whatsoever to condemn their actions. I won’t apologise though, or justify my point of view.
Tariq Ramadan
Precedents are the disgrace of legislation. They are not wanted to justify right measures, are absolutely insufficient to excuse wrong ones. They can only be useful to heralds, dancing masters, and gentlemen ushers.
Laurence Sterne
We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.
Neil Gaiman
Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.
Henry Mintzberg
The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they’re just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.
Jose Saramago
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
Anytime you have anyone who thinks he or she has God in their pocket, you have the potential for disaster, … Throughout history, the claim that God is on your side has been used to justify any action, no matter how violent or destructive.
Charles Kimball
The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high [military] budget.
Merrill McPeak
I believe that the bigger problem is that we’re seeing people who arrive from Cuba and a year and a day later are travelling to Cuba 40 times a year, they’re staying, and that’s hard to justify. The problem is not that I want to deny anything to anyone; it is the need to justify those laws.
Marco Rubio
Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I’m going to get enough money to execute it properly I’ve got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.
Steven Soderbergh
You don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen – that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights.
Edward Snowden
Finally, the Witch justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure.
Paulo Coelho
I had given up magic, because it had reached a state of perfection. I felt that I was able to transform men into animals. I did not make use of this capability, because I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer
If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order may justify us in speaking our thoughts.
Edmund Burke
Does a population have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority’s forces? … Failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.
Frank Herbert
There is no question that Israelis – indeed, all concerned Jews – have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.
David Novak
India has a consistent and well-known position on terrorism. We oppose all acts of terrorism, wherever they occur. We have repeatedly said that no cause can justify violence and destruction, particularly aimed at civilians.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
One of the bad things about bad behavior by politicians (particularly by Donald Trump, because he’s president, but by others as well) is that it not only can encourage bad behavior by politicians of all ideological stripes but also can be cited to justify it.
George T. Conway III
Doesn’t the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.
Imelda Marcos
I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.
Paulo Coelho
All that you are, all that I owe to you, justifies my love.
Marquis de Lafayette
The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression.
William O. Douglas
The refs are so confused themselves because there’s so many rules. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh I’ve never seen this many rules in my life.’ And everybody’s trying to govern this and justify that.
Ray Lewis
Egoistical opinion that a man is the king of nature was created by the man himself, so he can justify his wrong decisions.
Ruben Papian
Do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before yourself an aim, a goal, a ‘to this end’, an exalted and noble ‘to this end’.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.
Alexander Herzen
People often ask me if I can justify the amount I earn, and I say I get paid that much because someone thinks it is worth their while to pay me that much, and if I they didn’t they’d soon stop. That said, no one’s more surprised at the money thing than me.
Colin McRae
..no meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.
Peter S. Beagle
Offending someone’s religious sensibilities can never justify a violent response. There are no ‘but’ qualifiers, and the sooner that this lesson is internalized, the rosier our future will be.
Gad Saad
The result justifies the deed.
Ovid
You don’t have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay.
Tori Amos
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
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
Noam Chomsky
Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.
David Lodge
If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.
Dick Gregory
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
Bill Vaughan
Everybody wants to make an opinion and that’s fine, but especially for young people to get involved in something they might not understand as much, I think they need to let people, whatever they do for a living, justify it.
Tommy Tuberville
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
Amitav Ghosh
And that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me. Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land.
Joseph Smith, Jr.
I don’t feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It’s good to have respect for a poet.
Derek Walcott
No one is wise enough, no nation is important enough, no human interest is precious enough, to justify the wholesale destruction and murder which constitute the science of war.
John Haynes Holmes
In a world where authenticity increasingly is in focus, consumers are seeking more than brands who focuses on revenue – consumers want to support brands with a purpose – one that justifies an emotional engagement.
Martin Lindstrom
Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest-it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.
Howard Gossage
Life’s not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.
Emily Giffin
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn’t refer to anything that’s real. If it’s consistent, if it’s entertaining, if it’s interesting, it justifies its being there.
Christopher Walken
There is nothing more ‘elitist’ than thinking our palate
pleasure can ever justify a second of suffering or
a single death. Please go vegan.
Gary L. Francione
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Salman Rushdie
I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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
I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.
Neil Sheehan
There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.
Donella Meadows
Sometimes directors feel like they have to justify that hat that they are wearing they’ve got on as a director, and they come in and they tweak and interfere.
Gary Oldman
To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Gore Vidal
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
I’m not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.
Quentin Tarantino
Picking on another person in their mind justifies and makes their stature higher. People do it interracially. It’s amazing how every race, every culture seems to have a culture they pick on.
Rib Hillis
Christians take Scriptures out of context to try to justify or to vindicate retreat and cowardice.
Randall Terry
Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.
Friedrich Engels
Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.
Hiram Rhodes Revels
A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.
Man Ray
Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.
Thomas Francis Meagher
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
When our conscience bothers us, whether we admit it or not, we often try to justify it by correcting others, or by finding fault with them. The readiness to believe evil about others is in large part ammunition for a thousand scandals in our own hearts.
Fulton J. Sheen
After I finished ‘The Darkest Minds’ series, I knew I wanted to take a risk and work on something completely different – lighter in tone, with a little bit more romance, and a completely different set of characters – that would also, um, finally justify my liberal arts degree.
Alexandra Bracken
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.
Leo Tolstoy
I think we’re a kind of desperation. We’re sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we’re doing is trying to brighten up the place. That’s why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers – because males have got to try and justify their existence.
Orson Welles
The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves.
Haruki Murakami
Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself.
Robert Greene
You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, ‘Things happen for a reason’, there’s a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.
Martin Landau
What does it say about a president’s policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again?
Mitt Romney
The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.
Saul Alinsky
People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith.
Desmond Tutu
Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
Seneca the Younger
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
While I remain troubled by the Corps’ inability to fully justify the Model they used for their commercial traffic predictions, America clearly has an aging lock and dam infrastructure on the Mississippi.
Ron Kind
I could justify violence only in this extreme case, to save the last living knowledge of Buddhism itself.
Dalai Lama
It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic.
Henry Rollins
Why climb? That’s a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can’t justify it. I can’t say it’s for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it’s full of vainglorious pursuits.
Jon Krakauer
I spend an extraordinary amount of time in my car, so I can justify the expense. That’s the only extravagance in my life – it’s my car.
Rachel Nichols
By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.
Kenzaburo Oe
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Walter Lippmann
My mother’s love for me was so great
I have worked hard to justify it.
Marc Chagall
There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone’s heart.
Colleen McCullough
I couldn’t really justify playing for money, and I think what I wanted to achieve put me at too great a risk, so I just decided on another profession.
Chris Borland
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
It will never do to plead sin as an excuse for sin, or to attempt to justify sinful acts by pleading that we have an evil heart. This instead of being a valid apology, is the very ground of our condemnation.
Archibald Alexander
‘Disruption’ is, at its core, a really powerful idea. Everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now. It’s the same way people hijacked the word ‘paradigm’ to justify lame things they’re trying to sell to mankind.
Clayton M. Christensen
We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.
Gary L. Francione
By dehumanizing others, among many other things, these people are also aiding the neocons and other forces of darkness to justify more war, more suffering, and more destruction.
Mohammad Marandi
There are people who try to justify eating fish by saying they have no feelings. Well, you watch a fish gasping for breath as it’s pulled out of the water, and then try and tell me it has no feelings!
Linda McCartney
Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others concerned with him have done evil! If a man has acted right, he has done well, though along; if wrong, the sanction of all mankind will not justify him.
Henry Fielding
In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.
Jared Diamond
Disapproval of homosexuality cannot justify invading the houses, hearts and minds of citizens who choose to live their lives differently.
Harry A. Blackmun
Lions cannot afford to hunt mice because they literally will starve to death, even if they catch them. Lions and all large carnivores have to hunt game large enough to justify the investment, so they have to hunt antelope and zebra. Why is this important? Because most senior executives are really big on chipmunks.
Newt Gingrich
Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations.
Steven Novella
If we come to the conclusion after 90 days that the synergies are big enough to justify the efforts, then we can go to the second step, which consists of saying: what would be the best organization and conditions – including shareholdings – in order to make sure the synergies happen.
Carlos Ghosn
Democrats justify anything they do against Trump as being righteous, even if it’s morally wrong or even if it’s illegal, because they’re so driven to stop Trump.
Matt Gaetz
For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.
Rupert Sheldrake
There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you’ve constructed an entire philosophy of evil.” –Luke Skywalker
Aaron Allston
People who lie, particularly those who lie really big, can’t do it effectively unless they feel that there’s a righteous power behind what they’re doing. You’re entitled to lie because the end justifies the means.
Alex Gibney
Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, ‘It’s business.’ That is, ‘it’s business’ has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.
Ida Tarbell
Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity – whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth – to justify the brutal assaults against black people of all genders.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
People have this misconception that people with six-pack abs can deliver hits, but that’s not the case. Had I built six-pack abs for ‘Tanu Weds Manu Returns,’ I wouldn’t have been able to justify myself.
R. Madhavan
Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.
Marcia Fudge
I will tell you that what gives me a sense of joy is having work to do that justifies pouring every ounce of energy I have into it. That’s really a blessing to have in your life. And it gives you energy back when you have the privilege of doing work that makes you feel that way.
Al Gore
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
Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.
Emily St. John Mandel
We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.
Margaret MacMillan
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.
Tim Ferriss
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
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
If you are at the top in entertainment, you earn money that you can never justify to ordinary people doing proper jobs. You can’t.
Gary Lineker
Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.
Noam Chomsky
The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.
Azar Nafisi
No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets’ view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.
Saul David
I grew up completely overwhelmed by TV, and part of the reason why I have gone into television is as a way to justify to myself all those wasted hours of watching TV as a kid. I can now look back and say, ‘Oh, that was research.’
Matt Groening
The graduate earnings premium, used by the Tories to justify many of their regressive higher education policies, is fast becoming a myth.
Angela Rayner
You can’t come in and value your company at $10 billion if you don’t have any sales, or you don’t have anything to justify why your company is worth that much.
Bobby Wagner
Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.
Margaret Thatcher
The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.
Peter Woit
Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing.
Byron Katie
Only he without sin can tell me if my means justify my ends.
Jay-Z
Although I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the Eastern philosophies, and of course the teachings of Muhammad, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout the ages. Were I to go to church, I’d be a hypocrite.
Danny Masterson
The ends do not justify the means
Seth
You need a director, a script, and a role to justify a risk.
Yami Gautam
If a person weren’t failing in some way, shape or form, would he or she need to blame, justify, or complain? The obvious answer is no.
T. Harv Eker
I do not believe that any political campaign justifies the declaration of a moratorium on ordinary common sense.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#BlackLivesMatter brought a new sense of urgency, audacity, and outrage to the issue of police violence against black men that has made it impossible to ignore, to cover up, or to justify.
Danny K. Davis
People will justify whatever for a good cause.
Julie Taymor
The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved.
Franz Grillparzer
Does the end justify the means? Or should it be, Do the ends justify the mean; do the extremes justify moderation?
Daniel N. Robinson
There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder.
Alan Dershowitz
In America, you’re allowed to justify almost any kind of bigotry, sexism, or intolerance if you source it to God’s big book of bad ideas.
Bill Maher
The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
Leo Tolstoy
As a senator, Obama denounced the Big Brother provisions of Bush’s post-9/11 Patriot Act, particularly its sections enabling the state to spy on Americans without their knowledge. After taking power, Obama acquired his other face. That face speaks far less, but when it does, it justifies Bush’s policies.
Neil Macdonald
It’s not enough to identify the Superobjective intellectually; you have to justify it, to find the emotional drive behind it. You need your own specific interpretation of the superobjective so that every time you think of it, it makes you emotional and drives you into action.
Larry Moss
People use ideas of non-duality as an escape from reality. It is very easy to say there is no winning and losing and justify the fact that you didn’t do a very good job.
Frederick Lenz
The animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it’s the natural thing to do.
Steven Spielberg
[…] I’ve come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.
Woody Allen
Do not look only at yourself, and you will see much. Do not justify yourself, and you will be distinguished. Do not brag, and you will have merit. Do not be prideful, and your work will endure.
Laozi
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
We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
Steven Pressfield
I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.
Alice Dreger
So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that’s what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It’s where we’re just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
Logically, it may be argued that banks could indeed lower interest rates and make up their profits through larger borrowing volumes. But banks, in turn, could justify exorbitant rates by arguing that they cater to a riskier segment.
Sucheta Dalal
You speak to the press at the Tour every day, but most often in a negative sense. Ninety per cent of the questions you are asked in the post-race press conferences are challenging or provocative, so you have to justify yourself; you have to try to give the right answers about every topic across the board.
Bradley Wiggins
I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.
Harry Leslie Smith
ISIS is attempting to rebrand Islam as an ideology that justifies violence and brutality. It rejects the kind of global order our nation has sacrificed so much to achieve.
Will Hurd
I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.
Gary Vaynerchuk
The pleasurable part of public mourning can also lead to a sense of self-sanctification that justifies in advance any war effort, whether or not the target and destruction are in any way related to the initial event.
Judith Butler
Manufacturing evidence to justify arbitrary, politically motivated detentions is a common tool of the illegitimate former Maduro regime.
Morgan Ortagus
Nobody sees themselves as being an evil person or doing something for a bad reason. There’s always something that justifies it to themselves.
Devin Druid
I’m curious by individuals that embrace half a story so they can justify how incomplete they feel about their own self worth.
Dane Cook
I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world.
Steve Earle
If and perhaps…. The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That’s just people looking to justify their own lack of action.
John Flanagan
History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.
Paul Valery
Happiness is overrated and money can’t justify it.
Benjamin Clementine
It is a lie that our anger justifies our impulse to hurt or ignore our antagonists. We are to forgive to be forgiven. To wait for them to repent before we forgive and repent is to allow them to choose for us a delay which could cost us happiness here and hereafter.
Henry B. Eyring
A man should take to himself no discomfort from an opinion expressed or implied by his adversary, but it is difficult, and oftentimes humiliating to attempt to justify the kindness of one’s friends.
Eugene V. Debs
If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with “compelling” reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordion-like quality.
William O. Douglas
I understand that the end does not justify the means. And this should be a lasting value for democracy.
Park Geun-hye
What amazes me is how far some people will go to justify their behavior to themselves, just to preserve that self-perception.
Christopher Golden
Violence by the defenders will be used by the putschists to justify overwhelming repression which they want to use anyhow. It will be used to CLAIM that the putschists are saving the country from ‪‎terrorism or ‪#civil war‬, and are preserving “‪law‬ and ‪‎order‬
Gene Sharp
Racists are irrational and illogical in their attempts to justify their prejudices.
Sargent Shriver
The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.
Arthur Koestler
Players talk about pot odds all the time, especially when they try to justify a call that they made. Whenever I hear this line of reasoning, though, I can’t help but wonder if they properly thought through the consequences of their call.
Phil Hellmuth
One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity–not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification ofthe range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.
Terri E Apter
Business should never be allowed to justify mean, thug ugly deals for any reason.
Ralph Steadman
I think people could justify labeling me if they saw a pattern in what I do, but right now that’s impossible.
Skeet Ulrich
Every lie has 2 parts – the lie we tell others and the one we tell ourselves to justify it.
George Deukmejian
One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
Maureen Dowd
Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn’t declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we’ve been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
Gore Vidal
Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you’re seeing justifies the conclusions you’re making.
Kim Stanley Robinson
When you love, love with with all your heart; don’t have any expectations. You love because that’s the only way you know how. It justifies your life.
Rita Zahara
Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.
Mary Garden
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
A state department official once told me this about the role of the president. He said: “We wage war for realist reasons, we justify wars for idealist reasons, and it’s the president’s job to balance the two.” I agree.
Michael Hastings
Is such an alliance helpful to us in this day and age? Are we creating a cold war in order to justify NATO?
Jill Stein
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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
All the time I feel I must justify my existence.
Prince Charles
…(Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.
Molly Haskell
When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically… but that does not justify him in pretending…that Christ is, in effect, Mars.
George Bernard Shaw
The ends justifies the means.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Although such research [into the paranormal] has yet to produce anything in the way of a repeatable controlled experiment, its practitioners argue that its revolutionary potentialities justify its continuation. My own feeling is that after a century of total failure it has become a bloody bore.
Dennis Flanagan
Black racism is a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings. As long as whites can be assured that blacks are racists, they can find reasons to justify their own oppression of’ black people.
James H. Cone
Anderson’s muckraking is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable works.
Thomas Griffith
An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.
Fernando Botero
I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
Man has an innate capacity for violence, but can only justify it in the name of justice.
Ralph Steadman
It appears that legal positions that you have supported have been used by the administration, the military, and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel.
Edward Kennedy
To then say that our own actions in combating evil have led to evil, is nothing more than saying, “Islamic terrorists are somewhat justified, at least we can understand why they hate us because we’ve done things to make them hate us. … We have been evil ourselves, and we are evil and that justifies them being evil.”
Rush Limbaugh
Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good.
Justin Cartwright
So is man’s heart. The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of his superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.
Jules Verne
Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward world justifies my inward universe of good.
Helen Keller
President Trump is, some ways, the personification of a new Bolshevism of the Right, where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears and the exploitation of what Lenin called ‘useful idiots.’
Simon Sebag Montefiore
When a man is afraid and accedes to fear, he will always find arguments to justify his own surrender.
Natan Sharansky
Whenever women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam. It is an unfounded argument. It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants.
Shirin Ebadi
Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.
Mahatma Gandhi
Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, ‘What justifies it?’ Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.
Bill Watterson
Trying to justify a world we don’t hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it’s better just to accept that things are as we see them.
Megan Chance
Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily.
Isabel Paterson
We will not stand for it any more. No more lies. No more pre-emptive, illegal war, based on false information. No more God-is-on-our-side religious nonsense to justify this immoral, illegal war. No more inhumanity.
Rocky Anderson
Hunger justifies the middle classes.
Julien Torma
Despite his profound incompetence on many levels, Obama has been an adept propagandist who has blamed capitalism for problems caused and magnified by socialist remedies to justify further socialist solutions. He’s now doing the same thing all over again as his new socialist solutions are failing.
David Limbaugh
Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.
Daniel S. Greenberg
Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations В— not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.
Elie Wiesel
We always know, we always know, which is the right way to go, and which is the wrong way to go. Sometimes, the wrong way is easier to go, or more satisfying, and so we choose that way instead of the right one and we justify it with complicated wordplay and such; but we are only kidding ourselves.
Milton William Cooper
[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
Jennifer Egan
My mother had to justify the fact that she had heart pills.
Patrik Sinkewitz
Though it’s harder to justify the use of a cadaver for practicing nose jobs than it is for practicing coronary bypasses, it is justifiable nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery exists, for better or for worse, and it’s important, for the sake of those who undergo it, that the surgeons who do it are able to do it well.
Mary Roach
Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.
Alexander Pushkin
It frequently happens that offenses are committed when the offender is not aware of it. Something he has said or done is misconstrued or misunderstood. The offended one treasures in his heart the offense, adding to it such other things as might give fuel to the fire and justify his conclusions.
Spencer W. Kimball
Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: ‘If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world’s wretchedness would rend my heart.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Financially, I do not need to work unless I want to, and whatever film I accept has to be right for me in the sense that it should justify the time I spend away from my husband and kids.
Kajol