1. To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid. 2. To defend or uphold as warranted or well-grounded. justifies, justified, justifying.
2. In psychology, the act or process of exercising the mind, the faculty of connecting judgments; the power and fact of using reason; the thought-processes of discussion, debate, argumentation or inference; the manifestation of the discursive property of the mind; the actual use of arguments with a view to convince or persuade; the art and method or proving or demonstrating; the orderly development of thought with a view to, or the attainment of a conclusion believed to be valid. -- The origin, nature and value of reasoning are debated questions, with their answers ranging from spiritualism (reasoning as the exercise of a faculty of the soul) to materialism (reasoning as an epiphenomenon depending on the brain), with all the modern schools of psychology ordering themselves between them. A few points of agreement might be mentioned here: reasoning follows judgment and apprehension, whichever of the last two thought-processes comes first in our psychological development; reasoning proceeds according to four main types, namely deductive, inductive, presumptive and deceptive; reasoning assumes a belief in its own validity undisturbed by doubt, and implies various logical habits and methods which may be organized into a logical doctrine; reasoning requires a reference to some ultimate principles to justify its progress 3. In logic, Reasoning is the process of inference, it is the process of passing from certain propositions already known or assumed to be true, to another truth distinct from them but following from them; it is a discourse or argument which infers one proposition from another, or from a group of others having some common elements between them. The inference is necessary in the case of deductive reasoning; and contingent, probable or wrong, in the case of inductive, presumptive or deceptive reasoning respectively. -- There are various types of reasoning, and proper methods for each type. The definition, discussion, development and evaluation of these types and methods form an important branch of logic and its subdivisions. The details of the application of reasoning to the various sciences, form the subject of methodology. All these types are reducible to one or the other of the two fundamental processes or reasoning, namely deduction and induction. It must be added that the logical study of reasoning is normative logic does not analyze it simply in its natural development, but with a view to guide it towards coherence, validity or truth. -- T.G.
accountable ::: subject to the obligation to report, explain, or justify something; answerable, responsible.
AnAgatavaMsa. In PAli, "Chronicle of Future Events"; a medieval PAli work in verse detailing the advent of Metteya (MAITREYA) Buddha in the far distant future of this auspicious eon (bhaddakappa; S. BHADRAKALPA). The current eon is deemed auspicious because five buddhas-Maitreya being the fifth-appear during its duration, the maximum number possible. Attributed to Cola Kassapa, author of Vimativinodanī, the AnAgatavaMsa claims to have been preached to sARIPUTRA by the Buddha. The text elaborates upon the prophecy of the coming of Maitreya found in the CAKKAVATTISĪHANADASUTTA of the DĪGHANIKAYA. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Burma, the AnAgatavaMsa became popular as a kind of charter for a host of millenarian movements and uprisings, including one that led in 1752 to the founding of Burma's last royal dynasty, the Konbaung. Its founder, Alaung hpaya (r. 1752-1760), and his sons utilized this text to justify claims that their wars of conquest were prophesied to usher in a Buddhist Golden Age. A synopsis in English of a nineteenth-century Burmese recension of the AnAgatavaMsa appears in HENRY CLARK WARREN's Buddhism in Translations as "The Buddhist Apocalypse."
antarAbhava. (T. bar do'i srid pa/bar do; C. zhongyin/zhongyou; J. chuin/chuu; K. chungŭm/chungyu 中陰/中有). In Sanskrit, "intermediate state" or "transitional existence," a transitional state between death (maranabhava) and rebirth (upapattibhava), distinct from the five or six destinies of SAMSARA (see GATI), during which time the transitional being (GANDHARVA) prepares for rebirth. The antarAbhava is considered one of sentient beings' "four modes of existence" (catvAro bhavAḥ), along with birth/rebirth (upapattibhava), life (purvakAlabhava), and death (maranabhava). The notion of an intermediate state was controversial. Schools that accepted it, including the SARVASTIVADA and most MAHAYANA traditions, resorted to scriptural authority to justify its existence, citing, for example, SuTRAs that refer to seven states of existence (bhava), including an antarAbhava. A type of nonreturner (ANAGAMIN), the third stage of sanctity in the mainstream Buddhist schools, was also called "one who achieved NIRVAnA while in the intermediate state" (ANTARAPARINIRVAYIN), again suggesting the scriptural legitimacy of the antarAbhava. There were several views concerning the maximum duration of the ANTARABHAVA. The ABHIDHARMAMAHAVIBHAsA, for example, lists such variations as instantaneous rebirth, rebirth after a week, indeterminate duration, and forty-nine days. Of these different durations, forty-nine days became dominant, and this duration is found in the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA and the YOGACARABHuMIsASTRA. Ceremonies to help guide the transitional being toward a more salutary rebirth, if not toward enlightenment itself, take place once weekly (see QIQI JI); these observances culminate in a "forty-ninth day ceremony" (SISHIJIU [RI] ZHAI), which is thought to mark the end of the process of transition, when rebirth actually occurs. The transitional being in the intermediate state is termed either a gandharva (lit. "fragrance eater"), because it does not take solid food but is said to subsist only on scent (gandha), or sometimes a "mind-made body" (MANOMAYAKAYA). During the transitional period, the gandharva is searching for the appropriate place and parents for its next existence and takes the form of the beings in the realm where it is destined to be reborn. In the Tibetan tradition, the antarAbhava is termed the BAR DO, and the guidance given to the transitional being through the process of rebirth is systematized in such works as the BAR DO THOS GROL CHEN MO, commonly known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Like several of the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS, the THERAVADA scholastic tradition rejects the notion of an intermediate state, positing instead that an instantaneous "connecting" or "linking" consciousness (P. patisandhiviNNAna; S. *pratisaMdhivijNAna) directly links the final moment of consciousness in the present life to the first moment of consciousness in the next.
Arianism: A view named after Arius (256-336), energetic presbyter of Alexandria, condemned as a heretic by the ancient Catholic Church. Arius held that Jesus and God were not of the same substance (the orthodox position). He maintained that although the Son was subordinate to the Father he was of a similar nature. The controversy on the relation of Jesus to God involved the question of the divine status of Jesus. If he were not divine how could the church justify him as an object of worship, of trust, and adoration? If he is divine, how could such a belief square with the doctrine of one God (monotheism)? Arianism tended toward the doctrine of the subordination of Jesus to God, involving the extreme Arians who held Jesus to be unlike God and the moderate Arians who held that Jesus was of similar essence with God although not of the same substance. Some eighteen councils were convened to consider this burning question, parties in power condemning and placing each other under the ban. The Council of Nicea in 325 repudiated Arian tendencies but the issue was fought with uncertain outcome until the Council of Constantinople in 381 reaffirmed the orthodox view. -- V.F.
averment ::: v. t. --> The act of averring, or that which is averred; affirmation; positive assertion.
Verification; establishment by evidence.
A positive statement of facts; an allegation; an offer to justify or prove what is alleged.
aver ::: n. --> A work horse, or working ox. ::: v. t. --> To assert, or prove, the truth of.
To avouch or verify; to offer to verify; to prove or justify. See Averment.
To affirm with confidence; to declare in a positive
avow ::: v. t. --> To declare openly, as something believed to be right; to own or acknowledge frankly; as, a man avows his principles or his crimes.
To acknowledge and justify, as an act done. See Avowry. ::: n. --> Avowal.
(b) Deism is a term referring collectively and somewhat loosely to a group of religious thinkers of the 17th (and 18th) century in England and France who in attempting to justify religion, particularly Christianity, began by establishing the harmony of reason and revelation and developed what, in their time, was regarded as extreme views: assaults upon traditional supernaturalism, external revelation and dogmas implying mysteries, and concluding that revelation is superfluous, that reason is the touchstone to religious validity, that religion and ethics are natural phenomena, that the traditional God need hardly be appealed to since man finds in nature the necessary guides for moral and religious living. Not all deists, so called, went toward the more extreme expressions. Among the more important English deists were Toland, Collins, Tindal, Chubb and Morgan. Voltaire (1694-1778) influenced by English thought is the notable example of deism in France. On the whole the term represents a tendency rather than a school. -- V.F.
justify ::: a. --> To prove or show to be just; to vindicate; to maintain or defend as conformable to law, right, justice, propriety, or duty.
To pronounce free from guilt or blame; to declare or prove to have done that which is just, right, proper, etc.; to absolve; to exonerate; to clear.
To treat as if righteous and just; to pardon; to exculpate; to absolve.
To prove; to ratify; to confirm.
justifying ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Justify
causeless ::: having no justifying cause or reason.
compurgation ::: v. t. --> The act or practice of justifying or confirming a man&
Computer Telephone Integration ::: (communications) (CTI or - Telephony -) Enabling computers to know about and control telephony functions such as making and receiving voice, fax, integration of telephone and computer systems and is a major development in the evolution of the automated office.CTI is not a new concept - such links have been used in the past in large telephone networks - but only dedicated call centres could justify the costs of Novell, Microsoft and Intel are developing better telephony services and capabilities which should eventually enable low cost CTI.The main CTI functions are integrating messaging with databases, word processors etc.; controlling voice, fax, and e-mail messaging systems from a single answered or transferred; speech synthesis and speech recognition; automatic logging of call related information for invoicing purposes or callback.Typical productivity benefits are improved customer service; increased productivity; reduced costs; enhanced workflow automation; protected investment in computers and telephony; computerised telephony intelligence.IBM were one of the first with workable CTI, now sold as CallPath. Callware's Phonetastic is typical of the new breed of middleware.CTI came out of the 1980s call centre boom, where it linked central servers and IVRs with PBXes to provide call transfer and screen popping. In the 1990s, TAPI, to provide a desktop version that would allow control of a desktop telephone and assist in hot desking.Desktop CTI was made obsolete by the mobile phone revolution, e-mail and, above all, VoIP, and CTI has never advanced outside the call centre.See also Telephony Application Programming Interface.(2003-12-04)
construct validity: an indicator of validity, which aims to demonstrate that the phenomenon being measured actually exists, for example, by justifying it in relation to a model or theory.
deduction: A method of inference which attempts to "justify" conclusions by applying rules of inference on the premises of the argument and other such conclusions.
deontologism ::: An ethical theory considered solely on duty and rights, where one has an unchanging moral obligation to abide by a set of defined principles. Thus, the ends of any action never justify the means in this ethical system. If someone were to do their moral duty, then it would not matter if that duty had negative consequences. Because of this reasoning, consequentialism is sometimes considered the philosophical antithesis of deontologism.
Every sadbaka Is faced with two elements in him, the inner being which wants the Divine and the sadhana and the outer mainly vital and physical being which does not want them but remains attached to the things of the ordinary life. The mind is sometimes led by one, someUoves by the other. One of the most important things he has to do, therefore, is to decide fundamentally the quarrel between these two parts and to persuade or compel by psychic aspiration, by steadiness of the mind’s thought and will, by the choice of the higher vital in his emotional being, the opposing elements to be first quiescent and then consenting. So long as he is not able to do that his progress must be either very slow or fluctuating and chequered as the aspiration within cannot have a continuous action or a continuous result. Besides so long as thb is so, there are likely to be periodical revolts of the vita! repining at the slow progress, des- pairing, desponding, declaring the Adhar unfit ; calls from old life will come ; circumstances will be attracted which seem to justify it, suggestions will come from men and unseen powers pressing the sadhaka away from the sadhana and pointing back- ward to the former life. And yet in that life he is not likely to get any real satisfaction.
excuse ::: v. t. --> To free from accusation, or the imputation of fault or blame; to clear from guilt; to release from a charge; to justify by extenuating a fault; to exculpate; to absolve; to acquit.
To pardon, as a fault; to forgive entirely, or to admit to be little censurable, and to overlook; as, we excuse irregular conduct, when extraordinary circumstances appear to justify it.
To regard with indulgence; to view leniently or to overlook; to pardon.
Fallacy is any unsound step or process of reasoning, especially one which has a deceptive appearance of soundness or is falsely accepted as sound. The unsoundness may consist either in a mistake of formal logic, or in the suppression of a premiss whose unacceptability might have been recognized if it had been stated, or in a lack of genuine adaptation of the reasoning to its purpose. Of the traditional names which purport to describe particular kinds of fallacies, not all have a sufficiently definite or generally accepted meaning to justify notice. See, however, the following:
far ::: n. --> A young pig, or a litter of pigs. ::: a. --> Distant in any direction; not near; remote; mutually separated by a wide space or extent.
Remote from purpose; contrary to design or wishes; as, far be it from me to justify cruelty.
Fideism: A doctrine of Abbe Bautain which attempted to justify the teachings of Christianity by the theory that all knowledge rested upon premises accepted by faith. The premises of religion are to be found in the tradition of the Synagogue and Church. This tradition needs no rational criticism because it is self-critical. The doctrine was condemned in 1840 by Gregory XVI. -- G.B.
first derivative test: A crude method for determining the nature of a stationary point. It works by checking the gradients of points on both sides of the stationary point (which has a gradient of zero by definition). If the signs are different, the stationary point is an extremum. While if the signs are the same, then it is an inflection point. The use of this method relies on the assumption that the gradients do not change signs between "the points of test" and the stationary point. This assumption may be hard to justify for more exotic functions.
foundationalism ::: Any justification or knowledge theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified (known) when they are based on basic beliefs (also called foundational beliefs). Basic beliefs are beliefs that are self-justifying or self-evident, and don't need to be justified by other beliefs. Basic beliefs provide justificatory support to other beliefs, which can in turn support further derivative beliefs. Foundationalists hold that basic beliefs are justified by mental events or states (such as experiences) that do not constitute beliefs (these are called nondoxastic mental states), or that they simply are not the type of thing that can (or needs to be) justified.
glassite ::: n. --> A member of a Scottish sect, founded in the 18th century by John Glass, a minister of the Established Church of Scotland, who taught that justifying faith is "no more than a simple assent to the divine testimone passively recived by the understanding." The English and American adherents of this faith are called Sandemanians, after Robert Sandeman, the son-in-law and disciple of Glass.
hongaku. (本覺). In Japanese, "original enlightenment." The notion that enlightenment was a quality inherent in the minds of all sentient beings (SATTVA) initially developed in East Asia largely due to the influence of such presumptive APOCRYPHA as the DASHENG QIXIN LUN. The Dasheng qixin lun posited a distinction between the potentiality to become a buddha that was inherent in the minds of every sentient being, as expressed by the term "original enlightenment" (C. BENJUE; pronounced hongaku in Japanese); and the soteriological process through which that potential for enlightenment had to be put into practice, which it called "actualized enlightenment" (C. SHIJUE; J. shikaku). This distinction is akin to the notion that a person may in reality be enlightened (original enlightenment), but still needs to learn through a course of religious training how to act on that enlightenment (actualized enlightenment). This scheme was further developed in numerous treatises and commentaries written by Chinese exegetes in the DI LUN ZONG, HUAYAN ZONG, and TIANTAI ZONG. ¶ In medieval Japan, this imported soteriological interpretation of "original enlightenment" was reinterpreted into an ontological affirmation of things just as they are. Enlightenment was thence viewed not as a soteriological experience, but instead as something made manifest in the lived reality of everyday life. Hongaku thought also had wider cultural influences, and was used, for example, to justify conceptually incipient doctrines of the identity between the buddhas and bodhisattvas of Buddhism and the indigenous deities (KAMI) of Japan (see HONJI SUIGAKU; SHINBUTSU SHuGo). Distinctively Japanese treatments of original enlightenment thought begin in the mid-eleventh century, especially through oral transmissions (kuden) within the medieval TENDAISHu tradition. These interpretations were subsequently written down on short slips of paper (KIRIGAMI) that were gradually assembled into more extensive treatments. These interpretations ultimately came to be attributed by tradition to the great Tendai masters of old, such as SAICHo (767-822), but connections to these earlier teachers are dubious at best and the exact dates and attributions of these materials are unclear. During the late Heian and Kamakura periods, hongaku thought bifurcated into two major lineages, the Eshin and Danna (both of which subsequently divided into numerous subbranches). This bifurcation was largely a split between followers of the two major disciples of the Tendai monk RYoGEN: GENSHIN (942-1017) of Eshin'in in YOKAWA (the famous author of the oJo YoSHu); and Kakuun (953-1007) of Danna'in in the Eastern pagoda complex at ENRYAKUJI on HIEIZAN. The Tendai tradition claims that these two strands of interpretation derive from Saicho, who learned these different approaches while studying Tiantai thought in China under Daosui (J. Dosui/Dozui; d.u.) and Xingman (J. Gyoman; d.u.), and subsequently transmitted them to his successors in Japan; the distinctions between these two positions are, however, far from certain. Other indigenous Japanese schools of Buddhism that developed later during the Kamakura period, such as the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, seem to have harbored more of a critical attitude toward the notion of original enlightenment. One of the common charges leveled against hongaku thought was that it fostered a radical antinomianism, which denied the need for either religious practice or ethical restraint. In the contemporary period, the notion of original enlightenment has been strongly criticized by advocates of "Critical Buddhism" (HIHAN BUKKYo) as an infiltration into Buddhism of Brahmanical notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAN); in addition, by valorizing the reality of the mundane world just as it is, hongaku thought was said to be an exploitative doctrine that had been used in Japan to justify societal inequality and political despotism. For broader East Asian perspectives on "original enlightenment," see BENJUE.
huguo Fojiao. (J. gokoku Bukkyo; K. hoguk Pulgyo 護國佛敎). In Chinese, "state-protection Buddhism," referring to the sociopolitical role Buddhism played in East Asia to protect the state against war, insurrection, and natural disasters. The doctrinal justification for such a protective role for Buddhism derives from the "Guanshiyin pusa pumen pin" ("Chapter on the Unlimited Gate of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA") and the "Tuoluoni pin" (DHĀRAnĪ chapter) of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), the "Huguo pin" ("Chapter on Protecting the State") of the RENWANG JING ("Scripture for Humane Kings"), and the "Zhenglun pin" ("Chapter on Right View") of the SUVARnAPRABHĀSOTTAMASuTRA ("Golden Light Sutra"). For example, the Suvarnaprabhāsottamasutra states that a ruler who accepts that sutra and has faith in the dharma will be protected by the four heavenly kings (CĀTURMAHĀRĀJAKĀYIKA); but if he neglects the dharma, the divinities will abandon his state and calamity will result. The "Huguo pin" of the Renwang jing notes that "when the state is thrown into chaos, facing all sorts of disasters and being destroyed by invading enemies," kings should set up in a grand hall one hundred buddha and bodhisattva images and one hundred seats, and then invite one hundred eminent monks to come there and teach the Renwang jing. This ritual, called the "Renwang Assembly of One-Hundred Seats" (C. Renwang baigaozuo hui; J. Ninno hyakukozae; K. Inwang paekkojwa hoe) would ward off any calamity facing the state and was held in China, Japan, and Korea from the late sixth century onward. In Japan, these three scriptures were used to justify the role Buddhism could play in protecting the state; and the Japanese reformist NICHIREN (1222-1282) cites the Suvarnaprabhāsottamasutra in his attempts to demonstrate that the calamities then facing Japan were a result of the divinities abandoning the state because of the government's neglect of the true teachings of Buddhism. The notion of state protection also figured in the introduction of ZEN to Japan. In 1198, the TENDAI and ZEN monk MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215) wrote his KoZEN GOKOKURON ("Treatise on the Promulgation of Zen as a Defense of the State"), which explained why the new teachings of Zen would both protect the state and allow the "perfect teachings" (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) of Tendai to flourish. ¶ "State-protection Buddhism" has also been posited as one of the defining characteristics of Korean Buddhism. There are typically four types of evidence presented in support of this view. (1) Such rituals as the Inwang paekkojwa hoe (Renwang jing recitation) were held at court at least ten times during the Silla dynasty and increased dramatically to as many as one hundred twenty times during the succeeding Koryǒ dynasty. (2) Monasteries and STuPAs were constructed for their apotropaic value in warding off calamity. During the Silla dynasty, e.g., HWANGNYONGSA and its nine-story pagoda, as well as Sach'onwangsa (Four Heavenly Kings Monastery), were constructed for the protection of the royal family and the state during the peninsular unification wars. During the succeeding Koryo dynasty, the KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG (Korean Buddhism canon) was carved (twice) in the hopes that state support for this massive project would prompt the various buddhas and divinities (DEVA) to ward off foreign invaders and bring peace to the kingdom. (3) Eminent monks served as political advisors to the king and the government. For example, Kwangjong (r. 949-975), the fourth monarch of the Koryǒ dynasty, established the positions of wangsa (royal preceptor) and kuksa (state preceptor, C. GUOSHI), and these offices continued into the early Choson dynasty. (4) Monks were sometimes at the vanguard in repelling foreign invaders, such as the Hangmagun (Defeating Māra Troops) in twelfth-century Koryo, who fought against the Jurchen, and the Choson monks CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG (1520-1604) and SAMYoNG YUJoNG (1544-1610), who raised monks' militias to fight against the Japanese during the Hideyoshi invasions of the late sixteenth century. In the late twentieth century, revisionist historians argued that the notion of "state-protection Buddhism" in Korea may reflect as much the political situation of the modern and contemporary periods as any historical reality, and may derive from the concept of "chingo kokka" (protecting the state) advocated by Japanese apologists during the Buddhist persecution of the Meiji period (1868-1912).
Hwangnyongsa. (皇/龍寺). In Korean, "royal," or "Yellow Dragon Monastery" ("royal" and "yellow" are homophonous in Korean); an important Korean monastery located in the Silla-dynasty capital of Kyongju. The monastery was constructed between 553 and 569, during the reign of the Silla king Chinhŭng (r. 540-576) and was especially renowned for its sixteen-foot high image of sĀKYAMUNI Buddha (completed in 574) and its massive, nine-story pagoda (STuPA), which was built in 645 during the reign of Queen Sondok (r. 632-647). In the winter of 1238, during the succeeding Koryo dynasty (918-1392), the entire monastery, including the buddha image and the pagoda, was totally destroyed by invading Mongol troops, and only the foundation stones currently remain. The site of the monastery was excavated by the Kyongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage between 1976 and 1983. Royal Dragon monastery flourished due to the support of the Silla royal family, which sought to use Buddhism as an unifying political ideology; The stories told concerning the foundation of the monastery, the image, and the pagoda all reflect this fact. The construction of the monastery is thus often cited as an example of "state-protection Buddhism" hoguk Pulgyo; C. HUGUO FOJIAO) in Korea. According to the SAMGUK YUSA ("Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms"), in the second month of 553, King Chinhŭng was building a new palace to the south of his Dragon Palace and east of Wolsong palace, when a yellow dragon (hwangnyong) appeared at the site. Yellow dragons were popular autochthonous deities in Silla; hence, given the auspicious nature of this apparition, the king changed plans and instead built a Buddhist monastery on the site, which is called both Yellow Dragon and Royal Dragon monastery in the literature. When the Silla monk CHAJANG (d.u.; fl. c. 590-658) was training at WUTAISHAN in China, an emanation of the bodhisattva MANJUsRĪ told him that Hwangnyongsa was constructed on the site of the dispensation of the previous buddha KĀsYAPA. Not long after the monastery's completion, a ship with 57,000 pounds of iron and 30,000 ounces of gold aboard appeared at Sap'o Harbor in Hagok County (currently Kokp'o near Ulsan, on the southeast coast of the peninsula). The ship also carried an inscription, which said that the Indian king AsOKA, having tried and failed three times to forge a sākyamuni triad from these metals, had finally decided to load the materials aboard ship, along with models of the images, and send them off in search of a land with the requisite metallurgical skill to craft such a statue. King Chinŭng ordered his metallurgists to forge this sixteen-foot statue of the Buddha, and they succeeded on the first attempt in the third month of 574. Chajang also was told by MANJUSRĪ that the queen belonged to the Indian KsATRIYA caste. He was later told by a divine being that if a nine-story pagoda were constructed within the precincts of Royal Dragon monastery, the kingdoms bordering Silla would surrender and submit to Silla hegemony. Hearing Chajang's prediction, in 645, the queen built the pagoda, which was 224 feet tall and made entirely of wood. Chajang placed within its columns some of the relics (sARĪRA) of the Buddha that he had received at Wutaishan. (Another portion was enshrined at T'ONGDOSA, where they remain still today.) It was said that the nine stories of the pagoda symbolized the nine kingdoms and tribal leagues surrounding Silla. During the time when Hwangnyongsa was constructed, the unification wars between the three Korean kingdoms of Silla, Koguryo, and Paekche were raging. The Silla monarchs at this time tried to justify their royal authority by relying on Buddhism, particularly by comparing the Silla rulers to the imported Buddhist notion of the ideal Buddhist ruler, or CAKRAVARTIN (wheel-turning emperor) and by positing that the royal family was genealogically related to the ksatriya clan of the Buddha. These associations are also obvious in the personal names of Silla kings, queens, and other royal family members. For example, the names of the King Chinhŭng's two princes were Tongnyun (Copper Wheel) and Kŭmnyun (Gold Wheel), both specific types of cakravartins; additionally, King Chinp'yong's personal name was Paekchong and his queen's was Maya, the Sino-Korean translation and transcription, respectively, of the names of sākyamuni Buddha's father and mother, sUDDHODANA and MĀYĀ. The foundation of Hwangnyongsa was intimately associated with these attempts by the royal family to employ Buddhism as a tool for justifying and reinforcing its authority. The monastery sponsored the Inwang Paekkojwa hoe (Humane Kings Assembly of One-Hundred Seats), a state-protection (hoguk) rite based on the RENWANGJING ("Scripture for Humane Kings"), in the hopes that the power of the buddhadharma would protect and promote the royal family and the kingdom. According to both the Samguk yusa and the Samguk Sagi ("Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms"), such a ceremony was held at Hwangnyongsa in 613 and 636, before the unification of the three kingdoms, as well as several times subsequently. Monks who resided at Hwangnyongsa also played important roles in Silla politics and religion. WoN'GWANG (532-630), who composed the five codes of conduct for the "flower boys" (hwarang), an elite group of male aristocratic youths, may have written there a letter to ask Emperor Yangdi (r. 604-618) of the Sui dynasty to attack Koguryo on Silla's behalf. Another resident, Chajang, encouraged the royal family to adopt Chinese official attire and the Chinese chronological era at the Silla court and was appointed kukt'ong (state superintendent), to supervise the entire Silla Buddhist ecclesia. Several other Hwangnyongsa monks, including Hyehun (fl. c. 640), Kangmyong (fl. 655), and Hunp'il (fl. 879), were appointed to kukt'ong and other important Silla ecclesiastical positions. Finally, several important Silla scholar-monks resided at Hwangnyongsa, including WoNHYO (617-686), who delivered his first public teaching of the KŬMGANG SAMMAEGYoNG NON ("Exposition of the Vajrasamādhisutra") at the monastery.
Infinite Monkey Theorem ::: (humour) If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet. (One may also hypothesise a justifying a brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem.This theorem was first popularised by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom through the classic short story Inflexible Logic by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.See also: RFC 2795.[Jargon File](2002-04-07)
Infinite Monkey Theorem "humour" "If you put an {infinite} number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesise a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the one {random} monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible *incorrect* versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a {brute force} method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a {one-banana problem}. This theorem was first popularised by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom through the classic short story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". See also: {RFC 2795}. [{Jargon File}] (2002-04-07)
In Spinoza's sense, that which "is", preeminently and without qualification -- the source and ultimate subject of all distinctions. Being is thus divided into that which is "in itself" and "in another" (Ethica, I, Ax. 4; see also "substance" and "mode", Defs. 3 and 5). Being is likewise distinguished with respect to "finite" and "infinite", under the qualifications of absolute and relative, thus God is defined (Ibid, I, Def. 6) as "Being absolutely infinite". Spinoza seems to suggest that the term, Being, has, in the strict sense, no proper definition (Cog. Met., I, 1). The main characteristics of Spinoza's treatment of this notion are (i) his clear-headed separation of the problems of existence and Being, and (ii) his carefully worked out distinction between ens reale and ens rationis by means of which Spinoza endeavors to justify the ontological argument (q.v.) in the face of criticism by the later Scholastics. -- W.S.W.
Judas Iscariot ::: (Gre. Judah, Heb. May God be Praised) One of the original twelve apostles of Jesus. According to Christian tradition, Judas informed the Jewish high priests as to Jesus' whereabouts for the price of thirty pieces of silver. He is thus perceived as sneaky, traitorous, and miserly, and his memory was often used as a way to justify Catholic persecution of the Jews.
justicer ::: a judge or magistrate. justicers. ::: justify
justification ::: n. --> The act of justifying or the state of being justified; a showing or proving to be just or conformable to law, justice, right, or duty; defense; vindication; support; as, arguments in justification of the prisoner&
justificative ::: a. --> Having power to justify; justificatory.
justified ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Justify
Li Tongxuan. (J. Ri Tsugen; K. Yi T'onghyon 李通玄) (635-730; alt. 646-740). Tang-dynasty lay exegete of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA (Huayan jing) and renowned thaumaturge. Li's life is the stuff of legend. He is claimed to have been related to the Tang imperial house but is known only as an elusive and eccentric lay scholar of Buddhism, who hid away in hermits' cells and mountain grottoes so as to devote himself entirely to his writing. Li's hagiographer says that he was able to work late into the night just from the radiance that issued forth from his mouth; his scholarship and health were sustained by two mysterious maidens who brought him paper, brushes, and daily provisions. The magnum opus of this life of scholarship is a forty-roll commentary to sIKsĀNANDA's "new" 699 translation of the AvataMsakasutra; his commentary is entitled the Xin Huayan jing lun and was published posthumously in 774. In the mid-ninth century, Li's commentary was published together with the sutra as the HUAYAN JING HELUN, and this compilation is the recension of Li's exegesis that is most widely used. Li also wrote a shorter one-roll treatise known usually by its abbreviated title of Shiming lun ("The Ten Illuminations"; the full title is Shi Huayan jing shi'er yuansheng jiemi xianzhi chengbei shiming lun), which discusses the Huayan jing from ten different perspectives on the doctrine of conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA), and two other shorter works. Because Li Tongxuan was not associated with the mainstream of the Huayan lineage (HUAYAN ZONG), he was able to develop his own distinctive vision of the insights found in the AvataMsakasutra, a vision that often offered an explicit challenge to the interpretations of FAZANG and the mainstream tradition. Li stands outside the orthodox patriarchal lineage of the Huayan school by being a layperson, not a monk, and by being someone interested not just in the profound philosophical implications of the scripture but also its concrete, practical dimensions. In his commentary, Li focuses not on the description of the dimensions of the realm of reality (dharmadhātu; see SI FAJIE) as had Fazang, but instead on SUDHANA's personal quest for enlightenment in the final, and massive, GAndAVYuHA chapter of the sutra. Li moved forward the crucial point of soteriological progress from the activation of the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPĀDA), which he places at the first stage of the ten abidings (shizhu), up to the first level of the ten faiths (shixin), what had previously been considered a preliminary stage of the Huayan path (MĀRGA). Since faith alone was sufficient to generate the understanding that one's own body and mind are identical to the dharmadhātu and are fundamentally equivalent to buddhahood, buddhahood could therefore be experienced in this very life, rather than after three infinite eons (ASAMKHYEYAKALPA) of training. ¶ Although Li's writings seem to have been forgotten soon after his death, there was an efflorescence of interest in Li Tongxuan during the Song dynasty, when specialists in the Linji school of Chinese CHAN Buddhism (LINJI ZONG), such as JUEFAN HUIHONG (1071-1128) and DAHUI ZONGGAO (1089-1163), and their acquaintance, the scholar-official ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1121), began to draw on Li's practical orientation toward the Huayan jing in order to clarify aspects of Chan practice. In particular, Li's advocacy of "nature origination" (XINGQI) in the Huayan jing (rather than conditioned origination of the dharmadhātu [FAJIE YUANQI]) seemed to offer an intriguing sutra parallel to Chan's emphasis on "seeing the nature" in order to "achieve buddhahood" (JIANXING CHENGFO). In Korea, POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) was strongly influenced by Li Tongxuan's portrayal of Huayan thought, using it to demonstrate his claim that the words of the Buddha in the scriptural teachings of KYO and the mind of the Buddha transmitted by SoN (C. Chan) were identical. Through Li, Chinul was able to justify his claim of an intrinsic harmony between Son and Kyo. Chinul also wrote two treatises on Li's Huayan thought, including a three-roll abridgement of Li's Xin Huayan jing lun, entitled the Hwaom non choryo. In Japan, MYoE KoBEN (1173-1232) drew on Li's accounts of the radiance emanating from the Buddha himself, in conjunction with his readings of esoteric Buddhism (MIKKYo) and his own prophetic dreams and visionary experiences, to create a distinctive meditative technique called the SAMĀDHI of the Buddha's radiance (Bukko zanmai). Thus, despite being outside the mainstream of the Huayan tradition, in many ways, Li Tongxuan proved to be its longest lasting, and most influential, exponent. PENG SHAOSHENG (1740-1796), in his JUSHI ZHUAN ("Biographies of [Eminent Laymen"), lists Li Tongxuan as one of the three great lay masters (SANGONG) of Chinese Buddhism, along with PANG YUN (740-803) and LIU CHENGZHI (354-410), praising Li for his mastery of scholastic doctrine (jiao).
Logic An attempt to formulate the processes of the ratiocinative mind, connecting idea with idea in a causal sequence, leading from predicate to conclusion. When the predicate consists of axioms, the species of logic is called deductive, or reasoning from the general to the particular; when the predicate is facts of experience, the logic is called inductive, or proceeding from particulars to generals. As a means of arriving at truth it alone is quite unreliable, as it is but a body of rules based on human experiences, and hence it is often rather a means of justifying conclusions after they have already been formed. This unreliability arises both from the difficulty of applying the process with rigid precision, and also from the uncertainty of the predicates in both systems. A study of what is written on logic will show that there is no agreement as to what constitutes an axiom — whether it is an intuitive perception of truth, or whether it is merely an inference from experience. The same uncertainty exists as to the validity of the assumptions from which inductive chains of reasoning are drawn.
Maitreya. (P. Metteya; T. Byams pa; C. Mile; J. Miroku; K. Mirŭk 彌勒). In Sanskrit, "The Benevolent One"; the name of the next buddha, who now abides in TUsITA heaven as a BODHISATTVA, awaiting the proper time for him to take his final rebirth. Buddhists believed that their religion, like all conditioned things, was inevitably impermanent and would eventually vanish from the earth (cf. SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA; MOFA). According to one such calculation, the teachings of the current buddha sĀKYAMUNI would flourish for five hundred years after his death, after which would follow a one-thousand-year period of decline and a three-thousand-year period in which the dharma would be completely forgotten. At the conclusion of this long disappearance, Maitreya would then take his final birth in India (JAMBUDVĪPA) in order to reestablish the Buddhist dispensation anew. According to later calculations, Maitreya will not take rebirth for some time, far longer than the 4,500 years mentioned earlier. He will do so only after the human life span has decreased to ten years and then increased to eighty thousand years. (Stalwart scholiasts have calculated that his rebirth will occur 5.67 billion years after the death of sākyamuni.) Initially a minor figure in early Indian Buddhism, Maitreya (whose name derives from the Indic MAITRĪ, meaning "loving-kindness" or "benevolence") evolved during the early centuries of the Common Era into one of the most popular figures in Buddhism across Asia in both the mainstream and MAHĀYĀNA traditions. He is also known as AJITA, although there are indications that, at some point in history, the two were understood to be different deities. As the first bodhisattva to become a figure of worship, his imagery and cult set standards for the development of later bodhisattvas who became objects of cultic worship, such as AVALOKITEsVARA and MANJUsRĪ. Worship of Maitreya began early in Indian Buddhism and became especially popular in Central and East Asia during the fifth and sixth centuries. Such worship takes several forms, with disciples praying to either meet him when he is reborn on earth or in tusita heaven so that they may then take rebirth with him when he becomes a buddha, a destiny promised in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") to those who recite his name. Maitreya is also said to appear on earth, such as in a scene in the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG's account of his seventh-century travels to India: attacked by pirates as he sailed on the Ganges River, Xuanzang prayed to and was rescued by the bodhisattva. Maitreya also famously appeared to the great Indian commentator ASAnGA in the form of a wounded dog as a means of teaching him the importance of compassion. Devotees across the Buddhist world also attempt to extend their life span in order to be alive when Maitreya comes, or to be reborn at the time of his presence in the world, a worldly paradise that will be known as ketumati. His earliest iconography depicts him standing or sitting, holding a vase (KUndIKĀ), symbolizing his imminent birth into the brāhmana caste, and displaying the ABHAYAMUDRĀ, both features that remain common attributes of his images. In addition, he frequently has a small STuPA in his headdress, believed to represent a prophecy regarding his descent to earth to receive the robes of his predecessor from MAHĀKĀsYAPA. Maitreya is also commonly depicted as a buddha, often shown sitting in "European pose" (BHADRĀSANA; see also MAITREYĀSANA), displaying the DHARMACAKRAMUDRĀ. He is said to sit in a chair in "pensive" posture in order to be able to quickly stand and descend to earth at the appropriate time. Once he is reborn, Maitreya will replicate the deeds of sākyamuni, with certain variations. For example, he will live the life of a householder for eight thousand years, but having seen the four sights (CATURNIMITTA) and renounced the world, he will practice asceticism for only one week before achieving buddhahood. As the Buddha, he will first travel to Mount KUKKUtAPĀDA near BODHGAYĀ where the great ARHAT Mahākāsyapa has been entombed in a state of deep SAMĀDHI, awaiting the advent of Maitreya. Mahākāsyapa has kept the robes of sākyamuni, which the previous buddha had entrusted to him to pass on to his successor. Upon his arrival, the mountain will break open, and Mahākāsyapa will come forth from a stupa and give Maitreya his robes. When Maitreya accepts the robes, it will only cover two fingers of his hands, causing people to comment at how diminutive the past buddha must have been. ¶ The cult of Maitreya entered East Asia with the initial propagation of Buddhism and reached widespread popularity starting in the fourth century CE, a result of the popularity of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and several other early translations of Maitreya scriptures made in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra describes Maitreya's present abode in the tusita heaven, while other sutras discuss his future rebirth on earth and his present residence in heaven. Three important texts belonging to the latter category were translated into Chinese, starting in the fifth century, with two differing emphases: (1) the Guan Mile pusa shangsheng doushuo tian jing promised sentient beings the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven together with Maitreya; and (2) the Guan Mile pusa xiasheng jing and (3) the Foshuo Mile da chengfo jing emphasized the rebirth of Maitreya in this world, where he will attain buddhahood under the Dragon Flower Tree (Nāgapuspa) and save numerous sentient beings. These three texts constituted the three principal scriptures of the Maitreya cult in East Asia. In China, Maitreya worship became popular from at least the fourth century: DAO'AN (312-385) and his followers were among the first to propagate the cult of Maitreya and the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven. With the growing popularity of Maitreya, millenarian movements associated with his cult periodically developed in East Asia, which had both devotional and political dimensions. For example, when the Empress WU ZETIAN usurped the Tang-dynasty throne in 690, her followers attempted to justify the coup by referring to her as Maitreya being reborn on earth. In Korea, Maitreya worship was already popular by the sixth century. The Paekche king Mu (r. 600-641) identified his realm as the world in which Maitreya would be reborn. In Silla, the hwarang, an elite group of male youths, was often identified with Maitreya and such eminent Silla monks as WoNHYO (617-686), WoNCH'ŬK (613-696), and Kyonghŭng (fl. seventh century) composed commentaries on the Maitreya scriptures. Paekche monks transmitted Maitreya worship to Japan in the sixth century, where it became especially popular in the late eighth century. The worship of Maitreya in Japan regained popularity around the eleventh century, but gradually was replaced by devotions to AMITĀBHA and KsITIGARBHA. The worship of Maitreya has continued to exist to the present day in both Korea and Japan. The Maitreya cult was influential in the twentieth century, for example, in the establishment of the Korean new religions of Chŭngsan kyo and Yonghwa kyo. Maitreya also merged in China and Japan with a popular indigenous figure, BUDAI (d. 916)-a monk known for his fat belly-whence he acquired his now popular East Asian form of the "laughing Buddha." This Chinese holy man is said to have been an incarnation of the bodhisattva Maitreya (J. Miroku Bosatsu) and is included among the Japanese indigenous pantheon known as the "seven gods of good fortune"(SHICHIFUKUJIN). Hotei represents contentment and happiness and is often depicted holding a large cloth bag (Hotei literally means "hemp sack"). From this bag, which never empties, he feeds the poor and needy. In some places, he has also become the patron saint of restaurants and bars, since those who drink and eat well are said to be influenced by Hotei. Today, nearly all Chinese Buddhist monasteries (and many restaurants as well) will have an image of this Maitreya at the front entrance; folk belief has it that by rubbing his belly one can establish the potential for wealth.
Materialism, however, stands commonly for an attitude of mind which exalts sense-life, together with its appropriate species of intellectualism, into a summum bonum; and which strives to devise a philosophy that will justify such an attitude. It is an attitude towards life consisting of mental and emotional attachment to externals, to the senses, and to reasoning based on sensory perceptions; and a corresponding neglect and denial of real values. This kind of materialism undermines morals by substituting self-interest or expediency for an innate moral sense, as the basis for conduct. It places illusory power in the hands of man, while at the same time depriving him of his real power of penetrating discrimination, and hence of his ability while under this illusion to use the powers of nature aright.
Menzan Zuiho. (面山瑞方) (1683-1769). Japanese reformer of the SoToSHu of ZEN during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), who is largely responsible for establishing DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253) as the font of orthodoxy for the Soto school and, during the modern and contemporary periods, as an innovative religious thinker. Born in Higo province in the Kumamoto region, Menzan studied with MANZAN DoHAKU (1636-1715) and later Sonno Soeki (1649-1705). At a thousand-day retreat Menzan led following Sonno's death, Menzan read texts by Dogen that had been neglected for centuries and subsequently used them as the scriptural authority from which he forged an entirely new vision of the Sotoshu; he then deployed this revisioning of Dogen to justify a reformation of long-held practices within the school. Menzan was a prolific author, with over a hundred works attributed to him, sixty-five of which have been published in modern Soto school collections; these works include everything from detailed philological commentaries to extended discussions of monastic rules and regulations. He remains best known for his Shobogenzo shotenroku, an eleven-roll encyclopedic commentary to Dogen's magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo.
Noetic [from Greek noetikos from nous mind] Pertaining to intelligence and spiritual reason, apart from mere mental ratiocination based upon appearances or the senses. The psychic part of our mind, the kama-manas, is intimately blended with the physical organism, and the interaction between the two seems to justify the conclusion that we move in a vicious circle under the sway of forces difficult to control when we center our consciousness in the psychic part of our constitution. However, by taking into account the noetic part of the human constitution, the buddhi-manas, which is independent of the sensual and emotional influences from the psychic nature, and by centering our consciousness in this noetic part of our being, we are at all times and in all places able fully to control, master, and therefore direct, the vigorous and erratic movements of the psychic nature. The noetic mind, because it is of a spiritual character, has no direct action on the physical brain or nervous system, but acts through the psychic part of the mind, and even then only through the finer elements of the cerebral and nervous texture.
“nowhere shows Yama ‘as having anything to do with the punishment of the wicked.’ As king and judge of the dead, a Pluto in short, Yama is a far later creation. One has to study the true character of Yama-Yami throughout more than one hymn and epic poem, and collect the various accounts scattered in dozens of ancient works, and then he will obtain a consensus of allegorical statements which will be found to corroborate and justify the Esoteric teaching, that Yama-Yami is the symbol of the dual Manas, in one of its mystical meanings. For instance, Yama-Yami is always represented of a green colour and clothed with red, and as dwelling in a palace of copper and iron. Students of Occultism know to which of the human ‘principles’ the green and the red colours, and by correspondence the iron and copper, are to be applied. The ‘twofold-ruler’ — the epithet of Yama-Yami — is regarded in the exoteric teachings of the Chino-Buddhists as both judge and criminal, the restrainer of his own evil doings and the evil-doer himself. In the Hindu epic poems Yama-Yami is the twin-child of the Sun (the deity) by Sanjna (spiritual consciousness); but while Yama is the Aryan ‘lord of the day,’ appearing as the symbol of spirit in the East, Yami is the queen of the night (darkness, ignorance) ‘who opens to mortals the path to the West’ — the emblem of evil and matter. In the Puranas Yama has many wives (many Yamis) who force him to dwell in the lower world (Patala, Myalba, etc., etc.); and an allegory represents him with his foot lifted, to kick Chhaya, the handmaiden of his father (the astral body of his mother, Sanjna, a metaphysical aspect of Buddhi or Alaya). As stated in the Hindu Scriptures, a soul when it quits its mortal frame, repairs to its abode in the lower regions (Kamaloka or Hades). Once there, the Recorder, the Karmic messenger called Chitragupta (hidden or concealed brightness), reads out his account from the Great Register, wherein during the life of the human being, every deed and thought are indelibly impressed — and, according to the sentence pronounced, the ‘soul’ either ascends to the abode of the Pitris (Devachan), descends to a ‘hell’ (Kamaloka), or is reborn on earth in another human form” (TG 376).
OBVIOUSLY we must leave far behind us the current theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice, the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure and deterrent dear to the surface human mind. There is here a more authentic and spiritual truth at the base of Nature’s action and a far less mechanically calculable movement. Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows and lollipops, no unprofitable wheel of a brutal cosmic justice automatically moved in the traces of man’s ignorant judgments and earthy desires and instincts. Life and rebirth do not follow these artificial constructions, but a movement spiritual and intimate to the deepest intention of Nature. A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law—or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, — the truth of Karma.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 20, 13 Page: 128, 427
parihāni. (P. parihāni; T. yongs su nyams pa; C. tui; J. tai; K. t'oe 退). In Sanskrit, lit., "diminution," "retrogression," or "backsliding" from virtuous states that had previously been cultivated or mastered. Parihāni refers specifically to the diminution of mental states that had been directed toward liberation (VIMUKTI), which allows mental disturbances to reappear and thus causes regression to previous habitual tendencies involving unwholesome or mundane thoughts and activities. The term often appears in debates concerning the issue of whether the noble persons (ĀRYAPUDGALA) are subject to backsliding. Such MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS as the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA, SARVĀSTIVĀDA, and SAMMITĪYA argued, for example, that ARHATs were subject to backsliding because they were still prone to vestigial negative proclivities of mind (ANUsAYA), even if those only manifested themselves while the monks were sleeping, e.g., nocturnal emissions. The STHAVIRANIKĀYA argued that arhats were not subject to backsliding since they had perfected all the necessary stages of training and were free from such proclivities. Related to this issue are discussions concerning the status of once-returners (SAKṚDĀGĀMIN) and nonreturners (ANĀGĀMIN): the majority of schools posited that once-returners and nonreturners could regress to the status of the stream-enterer (SROTAĀPANNA), the first level of sanctity, but that the status of the stream-enterer was not subject to retrogression and was thus inviolate. In the PURE LAND tradition, backsliding is a core rationale justifying the pure land teachings, since, in the world of SAMSĀRA, backsliding is inevitable for all except the most resolute practitioners. According to the AMITĀBHASuTRA, for example, sentient beings have accumulated karmic burdens since time immemorial and are invariably subject to backsliding; thus, they will never be able to escape from the endless cycle of birth-and-death on their own. For this reason, the buddha AMITĀBHA encourages them to seek rebirth in the pure land, instead, where they will have no hindrances to their eventual attainment of liberation. In the MAHĀYĀNA tradition, reaching the stage where there no longer is any prospect of regression is a crucial threshold on the path to liberation. Different scriptures place this point of nonbacksliding at different stages along the path. One of the most common explanations about which stage is "irreversible" (AVAIVARTIKA) appears in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA, which locates it on the eighth stage (BHuMI), the "immovable" (ACALĀ), where further progress is assured and where there is no possible of retrogressing to a preceding stage. However, HARIBHADRA in his commentary on the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA identifies two earlier points at which the bodhisattva becomes irreversible, one on the path of preparation (PRAYOGAMĀRGA) and one on the path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA).
Political Philosophy: That branch of philosophy which deals with political life, especially with the essence, origin and value of the state. In ancient philosophy politics also embraced what we call ethics. The first and most important ancient works on Political Philosophy were Plato's Politeia (Republic) and Aristotle's Politics. The Politeia outlines the structure and functions of the ideal state. It became the pattern for all the Utopias (see Utopia) of later times. Aristotle, who considers man fundamentally a social creature i.e. a political animal, created the basis for modern theories of government, especially by his distinction of the different forms of government. Early Christianity had a rather negative attitude towards the state which found expression in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. The influence of this work, in which the earthly state was declared to be civitas diaboli, a state of the devil, was predominant throughout the Middle Ages. In the discussion of the relation between church and empire, the main topic of medieval political philosophy, certain authors foreshadowed modern political theories. Thomas Aquinas stressed the popular origin of royal power and the right of the people to restrict or abolish that power in case of abuse; William of Ockham and Marsiglio of Padua held similar views. Dante Alighieri was one of the first to recognize the intrinsic value of the state; he considered the world monarchy to be the only means whereby peace, justice and liberty could be secured. But it was not until the Renaissance that, due to the rediscovery of the individual and his rights and to the formation of territorial states, political philosophy began to play a major role. Niccolo Machiavelli and Jean Bodin laid the foundation for the new theories of the state by stressing its independence from any external power and its indivisible sovereignty. The theory of popular rights and of the right of resistance against tyranny was especially advocated by the "Monarchomachi" (Huguenots, such as Beza, Hotman, Languet, Danaeus, Catholics such as Boucher, Rossaeus, Mariana). Most of them used the theory of an original contract (see Social Contract) to justify limitations of monarchical power. Later, the idea of a Natural Law, independent from divine revelation (Hugo Grotius and his followers), served as an argument for liberal -- sometimes revolutionary -- tendencies. With the exception of Hobbes, who used the contract theory in his plea for absolutism, almost all the publicists of the 16th and 17th century built their liberal theories upon the idea of an original covenant by which individuals joined together and by mutual consent formed a state and placed a fiduciary trust in the supreme power (Roger Williams and John Locke). It was this contract which the Pilgrim Fathers translated into actual facts, after their arrival in America, in November, 1620, long before John Locke had developed his theorv. In the course of the 17th century in England the contract theory was generally substituted for the theory of the divine rights of kings. It was supported by the assumption of an original "State of Nature" in which all men enjoyed equal reciprocal rights. The most ardent defender of the social contract theory in the 18th century was J. J. Rousseau who deeply influenced the philosophy of the French revolution. In Rousseau's conception the idea of the sovereignty of the people took on a more democratic aspect than in 17th century English political philosophy which had been almost exclusively aristocratic in its spirit. This tendency found expression in his concept of the "general will" in the moulding of which each individual has his share. Immanuel Kant who made these concepts the basis of his political philosophy, recognized more clearly than Rousseau the fictitious character of the social contract and treated it as a "regulative idea", meant to serve as a criterion in the evaluation of any act of the state. For Hegel the state is an end in itself, the supreme realization of reason and morality. In marked opposition to this point of view, Marx and Engels, though strongly influenced by Hegel, visualized a society in which the state would gradually fade away. Most of the 19th century publicists, however, upheld the juristic theory of the state. To them the state was the only source of law and at the same time invested with absolute sovereignty: there are no limits to the legal omnipotence of the state except those which are self imposed. In opposition to this doctrine of unified state authority, a pluralistic theory of sovereignty has been advanced recently by certain authors, laying emphasis upon corporate personalities and professional groups (Duguit, Krabbe, Laski). Outspoken anti-stateism was advocated by anarchists such as Kropotkin, etc., by syndicalists and Guild socialists. -- W.E.
Probability: In general Chance, possibility, contingency, likelihood, likehness, presumption. conjecture, prediction, forecast, credibility, relevance; the quality or state of being likely true or likely to happen; a fact or a statement which is likely true, real, operative or provable by future events; the conditioning of partial or approximate belief or assent; the motive of a presumption or prediction; the conjunction of reasonable grounds for presuming the truth of a statement or the occurrence of an event; the field of knowledge between complete ignorance and full certitude; an approximation to fact or truth; a qualitative or numerical value attached to a probable inference, and by extension, the systematic study of chances or relative possibilities as forming the subject of the theory of probability. A. The Foundation of Probability. We cannot know everything completely and with certainty. Yet we desire to think and to act as correctly as possible hence the necessity of considering methods leading to reasonable approximations, and of estimating their results in terms of the relative evidence available in each case. In D VI-VII (infra) only, is probability interpreted as a property of events or occurrences as such: whether necessary or contingent, facts are simply conditioned by other facts, and have neither an intelligence nor a will to realize their certainty or their probability. In other views, probability requires ultimately a mind to perceive it as such it arises from the combination of our partial ignorance of the extremely complex nature and conditions of the phenomena, with the inadequacy of our means of observation, experimentation and analysis, however searching and provisionally satisfactory. Thus it may be said that probability exists formally in the mind and materially in the phenomena as related between themselves. In stressing the one or the other of these two aspects, we obtain (1) subjectize probability, when the psychological conditions of the mind cause it to evaluate a fact or statement with fear of possible error; and (2) objective probability, when reference is made to that quality of facts and statements, which causes the mind to estimate them with a conscious possibility of error. Usually, methods can be devised to objectify technically the subjective aspect of probability, such as the rules for the elimination of the personal equation of the inquirer. Hence the methods established for the study and the interpretation of chances can be considered independently of the state of mind as such of the inquirer. These methods make use of rational or empirical elements. In the first case, we are dealing with a priori or theoretical probability, which considers the conditions or occurrences of an event hypothetically and independently of any direct experience. In the second case, we are dealing with inductive or empirical probability. And when these probabilities are represented with numerals or functions to denote measures of likelihood, we are concerned with quantitative or mathematical probability. Methods involving the former cannot be assimilated with methods involving the latter, but both can be logically correlated on the strength of the general principle of explanation, that similar conjunctions of moral or physical facts demand a general law governing and justifying them.
Rationalization: (Lat. rationalis, from ratio, reason) A psychological term to describe the mind's fabrication of rational argument to justify conduct of which one is really ashamed. -- L.W.
Rationalization: The mental fabric of explanations, on the ground of known facts and laws, for events, experiences, etc., which would otherwise be inexplicable. (For instance, the explanation of occult experiences in terms of physical laws.) In psychology, the term is used to describe the mind’s fabrication of rational argument to justify conduct of which one is really ashamed.
safety ::: n. --> The condition or state of being safe; freedom from danger or hazard; exemption from hurt, injury, or loss.
Freedom from whatever exposes one to danger or from liability to cause danger or harm; safeness; hence, the quality of making safe or secure, or of giving confidence, justifying trust, insuring against harm or loss, etc.
Preservation from escape; close custody.
Same as Safety touchdown, below.
Sampasādanīyasutta. (C. Zihuanxi jing; J. Jikangikyo; K. Chahwanhŭi kyong 自歡喜經). In Pāli, "Discourse on Serene Faith"; the twenty-eighth sutta of the DĪGHANIKĀYA (a separate DHARMAGUPTAKA recension appears as the eighteenth SuTRA in the Chinese translation of the DĪRGHAGĀMA; there is also a separate but untitled SARVĀSTIVĀDA recension in the Chinese translation of the SAMYUKTĀGAMA); addressed to sĀRIPUTRA at NĀLANDĀ in Pāvārika's mango grove. sāriputra declares that there has never been nor will there ever be anyone equal to the Buddha in wisdom. When questioned by the Buddha whether he had ever met a buddha of the past or had been able to fathom the Buddha's own mind, sāriputra admits he had done neither but nevertheless proceeds to justify his faith on the basis of the Buddha's unsurpassable qualities. The Buddha approves of sāriputra's explanation and advises him to preach it often to others.
scaleboard ::: n. --> A thin slip of wood used to justify a page.
A thin veneer of leaf of wood used for covering the surface of articles of furniture, and the like.
Some philosophers doubted or even denied the existence of the self. Thus, Hume pointed out (Treatise of Human Nature, I, pt. 4) that, apart from the bundle of successive perceptions, nothing justifying the concept of self can be discerned by introspection.
strong atheism ::: The philosophical position that deities do not exist. It is a form of explicit atheism, meaning that it consciously rejects theism. Some strong atheists also claim that the existence of any and all gods is logically impossible. Also called positive atheism, hard atheism and gnostic atheism. A strong atheist also fits the definition of a weak atheist, but that the reverse is not necessarily true: a strong atheist believes there is a lack or absence of evidence for justifying a belief in God or gods, but a weak atheist does not necessarily deny the possibility of God or god(s) existence.
suttavibhanga. In Pāli, "analysis of the suttas"; the first major section of the Pāli VINAYAPItAKA. Embedded within the suttavibhanga is the pātimokkha (S. PRĀTIMOKsA), a collection of 227 rules (311 for nuns) that were to be followed by fully ordained members of the Buddhist monastic community. The bulk of the suttavibhanga contains narratives and commentaries related to the promulgation of the pātimokkha rules, which explain the events that led to the Buddha's decision to establish a specific rule. Following the Buddha's pronouncement of the rule, the rule may be interpreted with word-for-word commentary and/or details that might justify an exception to the rule. In the suttavibhanga, these narrative and commentarial treatments are organized in the same way as the pātimokkha itself, that is, according to the category of offense. Thus, the suttavibhanga begins with the PĀRĀJIKA (defeat) offenses and works its way through the remaining sections of the pātimokkha. See also SuTRAVIBHAnGA.
Theodicy: (Gr. theos, god, dike, justice) The technical term for the problem of justifying the character of a good, creative and responsible God in the face of such doubts as arise by the fact of evil. If God is good, why evil? -- V.F.
toch'am. (圖讖). In Korean, "geomancy and divination"; a new theory of geomancy promulgated by the monk MYOCH'oNG (d. 1135), which was ultimately used to justify a rebellion against the Koryo dynasty. See MYOCH'oNG.
upāyakausalya. (P. upāyakosalla; T. thabs mkhas; C. fangbian shanqiao; J. hobenzengyo; K. pangpy'on son'gyo 方便善巧). In Sanskrit, "skillful means," "skill-in-means," or "expedient means," a term used to refer to the extraordinary pedagogical skills of the buddhas and advanced BODHISATTVAs; indeed, upāyakausalya is listed as one of the ten perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) mastered on the bodhisattva path. (The rare Pāli form refers specifically to the Buddha's teaching proficiency.) The notion of skillful means is adumbrated in the famous "simile of the raft" from the ALAGADDuPAMASUTTA, where the Buddha compares his teachings to a makeshift raft that will help one get across a raging river to the opposite shore: after one has made it across that river of birth and death to the "other shore" of NIRVĀnA, the teachings have served their purpose and may be abandoned; in one sense, therefore, all his teachings are merely an expedient. The notion of skill-in-means also suggests that the Buddha intentionally fashions different versions of his teachings to fit the predelictions and aptitudes of his audience. Because of a buddha's direct understanding of his disciples' abilities, he is able to teach what is most appropriate for each of them, like a doctor prescribing a treatment for a specific malady. Skillful means may also be used to justify why certain acts perceived as immoral by beings of lesser capacity become virtues when performed by a bodhisattva, who has their best interests at heart (see UPĀYAKAUsALYASuTRA). ¶ The Buddha's skill-in-means is often used to reconcile apparent contradictions in his teaching, since those teachings ultimately are provisional expressions of his realization. The notion of skillful means has also been put to polemical use, especially in the MAHĀYĀNA (and most famously in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA), when previous teachings of the Buddha, such as the three vehicles (TRIYĀNA), are declared by him to have been merely expedients that he employed to instruct disciples who were unable to comprehend the more profound teaching of the one vehicle (EKAYĀNA) of buddhahood. The concept of skillful means may thus also be deployed as a hermeneutical or polemical device to critique earlier, and implicitly inferior, formulations of Buddhist doctrine as expedient teachings given to those who are temporarily incapable of understanding and benefitting from the Buddha's more advanced teachings (as variously identified by different Buddhist schools).
vindicate ::: v. t. --> To lay claim to; to assert a right to; to claim.
To maintain or defend with success; to prove to be valid; to assert convincingly; to sustain against assault; as, to vindicate a right, claim, or title.
To support or maintain as true or correct, against denial, censure, or objections; to defend; to justify.
To maintain, as a law or a cause, by overthrowing enemies.
vindicatory ::: a. --> Tending or serving to vindicate or justify; justificatory; vindicative.
Inflicting punishment; avenging; punitory.
V. Probability as an Operattonal Concept: In this interpretation, which is due particularly to Kemble, probability is discussed in terms of the mental operations involved in determining it numerically. It is pointed out that probability enters the postulates of physical theories as a useful word employed to indicate the manner in which results of theoretical calculations are to be compared with experimental data. But beyond the usefulness of this word, there must be a more fundamental concept justifying it; this is called primary probability which should be reached by an instrumentalist procedure. The analogy of the thermometer, which connects a qualitative sensation with a number, gives an indication for such a procedure. The expectation of the repetition of an event is an elementary form of belief which can be strengthened by additional evidence. In collecting such evidence, a selection is naturally made, by accepting the relevant data and rejecting the others. When the selected data form a pattern which does not involve the event as such or its negative, the event is considered as probable. The rules of collecting the data and of comparing them with the theoretical event and its negative, involve the idea ol correspondence which leads to the use of numbers for its expression. Thus, probability is a number computed from empirical data according to given rules, and used as a metric and a corrective to the sense of expectation, and the ultimate value of the theory of probability is its service as a guide to action. The main interest of this theory lies in its psychological analysis and its attempt to unify the various conceptions of probability. But it is not yet complete; and until its epistemological implications are made clear, its apparent eclecticism may cover many of the difficulties it wishes to avoid. -- T.G.
warrant ::: n. --> That which warrants or authorizes; a commission giving authority, or justifying the doing of anything; an act, instrument, or obligation, by which one person authorizes another to do something which he has not otherwise a right to do; an act or instrument investing one with a right or authority, and thus securing him from loss or damage; commission; authority.
A writing which authorizes a person to receive money or other thing.
weak atheism ::: Disbelief in the existence of God or gods, without a commitment to the necessary non-existence of God or gods. Also referred to as negative atheism or implicit atheism. The weak atheist generally gives a broad definition of atheism as a lack or absence of evidence justifying a belief in God or gods, which defines atheism as a range of positions that entail non-belief, unjustified belief, doubt, or denial of theism.
KEYS (10k)
7 Sri Aurobindo
2 John Milton
1 R Buckminster Fuller
1 Josef Pieper
1 Hermann Hesse
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Bill Hicks
1 Saint Augustine of Hippo
1 Jorge Luis Borges
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
22 Anonymous
11 Dale Carnegie
9 Miguel Ruiz
9 Jonathan Haidt
8 The Arbinger Institute
8 Leo Tolstoy
8 Albert Camus
7 Stephen King
7 Paulo Coelho
7 Jonathan Safran Foer
7 Cheryl Strayed
7 Charles Dickens
7 Bertrand Russell
6 Noam Chomsky
6 Kim Stanley Robinson
6 Julian Barnes
6 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6 Fulton J Sheen
6 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 Eric Hoffer
1:And justify the ways of God to men. ~ John Milton, #KEYS
2:Violence in ordinary Nature does not justify violence in a spiritual work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Anger and Violence, #KEYS
3:It is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #KEYS
4: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, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, #KEYS
5: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. ~ John Milton,#KEYS
6:Nothing can spiritually justify individual violence done in anger or passion or from any vital motive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, Essays on the Gita, #KEYS
7:Though it was quite allowable in the earliest ages of the human race to marry one's sister, it is now abhorred as a thing which no circumstances could justify ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, The City of God XV.16), #KEYS
8: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, #KEYS
9: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,#KEYS
10:My lie has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. 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, #KEYS
11:High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.
Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond
And the work seems vain on which our heart's force was spent,
All shall be done for which our pain was borne.
Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
12:We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
~ R Buckminster Fuller,#KEYS
13:The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3:4,#KEYS
14:I know perfectly well that pain and suffering and struggle and excesses of despair are natural - though not inevitable - on the way, - not because they are helps, but because they are imposed on us by the darkness of this human nature out of which we have to struggle into the Light. . . .
The dark path is there and there are many who make like the Christians a gospel of spiritual suffering; many hold it to be the unavoidable price of victory. It may be so under certain circumstances, as it has been in so many lives at least at the beginning, or one may choose to make it so. But then the price has to be paid with resignation, fortitude or a tenacious resilience. I admit that if borne in that way the attacks of the Dark Forces or the ordeals they impose have a meaning. After each victory gained over them, there is then a sensible advance; often they seem to show us the difficulties in ourselves which we have to overcome and to say, "Here you must conquer us and here."
But all the same it is a too dark and difficult way which nobody should follow on whom the necessity does not lie.
In any case one thing can never help and that is to despond always and say, "I am unfit; I am not meant for the Yoga." And worse still are these perilous mental formations such as you are always accepting that you must fare like X (one whose difficulty of exaggerated ambition was quite different from yours) and that you have only six years etc. These are clear formations of the Dark Forces seeking not only to sterilise your aspiration but to lead you away and so prevent your sharing in the fruit of the victory hereafter. I do not know what Krishnaprem has said but his injunction, if you have rightly understood it, is one that cannot stand as valid, since so many have done Yoga relying on tapasya or anything else but not confident of any Divine Grace. It is not that, but the soul's demand for a higher Truth or a higher life that is indispensable. Where that is, the Divine Grace whether believed in or not, will intervene. If you believe, that hastens and facilitates things; if you cannot yet believe, still the soul's aspiration will justify itself with whatever difficulty and struggle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
15:What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.
You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.
But whoever is wisest among you is also just a conflict and a cross between plant and ghost. But do I implore you to become ghosts or plants?
Behold, I teach you the overman!
The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, dying off and self-poisoned, of whom the earth is weary: so let them fade away!
Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowels of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth!
Once the soul gazed contemptuously at the body, and then such contempt was the highest thing: it wanted the body gaunt, ghastly, starved.
Thus it intended to escape the body and the earth.
Oh this soul was gaunt, ghastly and starved, and cruelty was the lust of this soul!
But you, too, my brothers, tell me: what does your body proclaim about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment?
Truly, mankind is a polluted stream. One has to be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming unclean.
Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
What is the greatest thing that you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.
The hour in which you say: 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth, and a pitiful contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself!' ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Fred Kaufmann,#KEYS
16:Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother. It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Human Aspiration, #KEYS
1:Don’t explain or justify. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 2:The end doesn't justify the means. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 3:To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 4:Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 5:The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 6:Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 7:Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 8:People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 9:It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 10:The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 11:You are 100% emotional in everything you think, feel and decide. You decide emotionally and justify logically. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 12:The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 13:In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 14: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, @wisdomtrove 15: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, @wisdomtrove 16: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, @wisdomtrove 17:As men and women of character and of faith in the soundness of democratic methods, we must work like dogs to justify that faith. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 18: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, @wisdomtrove 19: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, @wisdomtrove 20:But neither can you 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, @wisdomtrove 21: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, @wisdomtrove 22: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, @wisdomtrove 23: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, @wisdomtrove 24: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, @wisdomtrove 25: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, @wisdomtrove 26: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-ferris, @wisdomtrove 27: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, @wisdomtrove 28: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, @wisdomtrove 29:Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 30:I love eating chocolate cake and ice cream after a show. I almost justify it in my mind as, & 31:Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations ¬ó not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 32:Let's realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let's realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 33: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, @wisdomtrove 34: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, @wisdomtrove 35:Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith... . Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 36: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, @wisdomtrove 37:Many sweat to reconcile St Paul and St James, but in vain. & 38: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, @wisdomtrove 39: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, @wisdomtrove 40: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, @wisdomtrove 41: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, @wisdomtrove 42: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, @wisdomtrove 43: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, @wisdomtrove 44: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-buffet, @wisdomtrove 45: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, @wisdomtrove 46: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, @wisdomtrove 47: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, @wisdomtrove 48:No matter what the issue is, don't try to justify why you don't feel good. And don't try to justify why you should feel differently. Don't try to blame whatever it is you think the reason is that's keeping you from feeling good. All of that is wasted effort. Just try to feel better right now. ~ esther-hicks, @wisdomtrove 49: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, @wisdomtrove 50: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? ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 51: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, @wisdomtrove 52:I assure you very explicitly, that in my opinion the conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness: and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard for the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 53:If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged ‚Äúgood‚Äù can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 54:[W]e think the very term & 55:When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 56:I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 57:To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 58:The ends do not justify the means. If our actions will bring harm to others, even in the service of some & 59:[Christ's] mission and work it is to help against sin and death, to justify and bring life. He has placed his help in baptism and the Sacrament [i.e., communion/Eucharist/Lord's supper], and incorporated it in the Word and preaching. To our eyes Baptism [capitalized in original] appears to be nothing more than ordinary water, and the Sacrament of Christ's body and blood simple bread and wine, like other bread and wine, and the sermon, hot air from a man's mouth. But we must not trust what our eyes see. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 60:I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 61:I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 62:I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations... . ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 63:I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 64:And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 65:The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 66:Often, when experiencing an unwanted situation, you feel a need to explain why it has happened, in an attempt, perhaps, to justify why you are in the situation. Whenever you are defending or justifying or rationalizing or blaming anything or anyone, you remain in a place of negative attraction. Every word you speak as you explain why something is not the way you want it to be continues the negative attraction, for you cannot be focused upon what you do want while you are explaining why you are experiencing something that you do not want. You cannot be focused upon negative aspects and positive aspects at the same time. ~ esther-hicks, @wisdomtrove 67:In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 68:How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Excuse tries to justify. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
2:The ends do not justify the means ~ Seth, #NFDB
3:The end doesn't justify the means. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
4:To justify God's ways to man. ~ A E Housman, #NFDB
5:God' is an excuse to justify hate. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
6:Listen. Don't explain or justify. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
7:to justify any such inference. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
8:any compulsion tries to justify itself. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
9:You can’t justify it, so let it alone. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
10:Can you justify your existence then? ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
11:You shouldn't have to justify your work. ~ Judy Chicago, #NFDB
12:You feign guilt in order to justify yourself. ~ Jean Racine, #NFDB
13:Snakes do not need to justify their behavior. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
14:A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
15:People will justify whatever for a good cause. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
16:Good ends will not justify evil actions. What ~ Richard Baxter, #NFDB
17:Misery suffered did not justify misery to come. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
18:If the end does not justify the means - what can? ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
19:All the time I feel I must justify my existence. ~ Prince Charles, #NFDB
20:Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
21:If the ends don't justify the means, then what does? ~ Robert Moses, #NFDB
22:I think in general the ends do not justify the means. ~ Howard Dean, #NFDB
23:Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
24:There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
25:Only he without sin can tell me if my means justify my ends. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
26:Success in one role can't justify failure in another. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
27:It is too difficult a Grace-
To justify the Dream- ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
28:Because it sounds like he's trying to justify his actions. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
29:It's more fun to arrive a conclusion than to justify it. ~ Malcolm Forbes, #NFDB
30:Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
31:Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
32:the ends never justify the means because IT never ends. ~ Martha Gellhorn, #NFDB
33:Don’t become the criminal to justify a crime done to you. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
34:The end of suffering does not justify the suffering ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
35:Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
36:People will use their religion to justify virtually anything. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
37:You don't have to justify yourself to me. You did what you did. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
38:And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. ~ A E Housman, #NFDB
39:Belief comes first. Actions that justify that belief come second. ~ Sean Platt, #NFDB
40:Casus Belli. It means an incident that's used to justify a war... ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
41:From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
42:You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use. ~ Steve Lacy, #NFDB
43:If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses) ~ Robert A Caro, #NFDB
44:He is trying to justify himself, but he cannot fool Krishna. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
45:Let go of feelings of guilt and the need to justify your actions. ~ Vadim Zeland, #NFDB
46:You can minimize your sin. Rationalize your sin. Justify your sin. ~ Johnny Hunt, #NFDB
47:All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence? ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
48:Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
49:To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
50:It is the work of God alone to justify, to sanctify, and to glorify. ~ John Wesley, #NFDB
51:What does he see in me to justify putting his life on the line? I ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
52:You don't have to justify anything. Being pissed off is absolutely ok. ~ Tori Amos, #NFDB
53:You don't need to justify or explain you dreams. They belong to you ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
54:An existant can never justify the existence of another existant. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
55:...as soon as the war was over, they had to justify what was done. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
56:If something is shocking without being funny it's hard to justify. ~ Seth MacFarlane, #NFDB
57:They appeared to know enough to justify their jobs, and nothing more. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
58:To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
59:To sin is a human business, but to justify sins is a devilish business. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
60:I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world. ~ Steve Earle, #NFDB
61:Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
62:People will selectively use “tradition” to justify anything. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
63:So while he made you without you, he doesn't justify you without you. ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
64:Anyone could reason themselves into a corner, and so justify surrender. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
65:You seem very anxious to lose your life.” “To justify my life, Sir. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
66:Excuses are used to justify leaving the scene of truth without changing. ~ Orrin Woodward, #NFDB
67:The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present. ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
68:Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
69:I'm not trying to justify myself, or say I'm not sorry, or not contrite. ~ Lance Armstrong, #NFDB
70:In a world of true abundance you shouldn't have to work to justify your life. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
71:There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder. ~ Alan Dershowitz, #NFDB
72:Whatever your beliefs are, you do not have to justify them to others. ~ Alexandra Stoddard, #NFDB
73:He who created you without you will not justify you without you. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
74:If sophisticated calculations are needed to justify an action, don't do it. ~ Robert Heller, #NFDB
75:You don't have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay. ~ Tori Amos, #NFDB
76:Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify. ~ Francis Picabia, #NFDB
77:In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
78:Slaveholders deployed so-called scientific racism to justify racial slavery. ~ Manisha Sinha, #NFDB
79:The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
80:There's no way I can justify my salary level, but I'm learning to live with it. ~ Drew Carey, #NFDB
81:Ends and means didn’t justify one another—they were two sides of the same coin. ~ Eliot Peper, #NFDB
82:Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
83:"It was Lao-tzu who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
84:No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents. ~ Edward Said, #NFDB
85:So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster. ~ Kent Conrad, #NFDB
86:The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
87:There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart. ~ Colleen McCullough, #NFDB
88:There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart. ~ Colleen McCullough, #NFDB
89:The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
90:Women usually justify their actions with whatever they make up in their heads. ~ Jamie McGuire, #NFDB
91:After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
92:Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
93:Education must ultimately justify itself in terms of enhancing human understanding. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
94:Give an economist a result you want, and he’ll find the numbers to justify it. ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
95:I’ve done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
96:Most people who know they’ve fucked up manage to find a way to justify themselves. ~ Megan Hart, #NFDB
97:Faith can inspire greatness, but it can be used to justify breathtaking cruelties. ~ S J Kincaid, #NFDB
98:Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
99:The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to
justify themselves. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
100:Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified? ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
101:The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt— ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
102:The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
103:What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
104:The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end. ~ Leon Trotsky, #NFDB
105:You can justify, from a political standpoint, any type of violence you want to use. ~ Jerry Vlasak, #NFDB
106:God’s purpose remains God’s secret, and he alone can justify his deeds among men. So, ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
107:ironically the term tolerance is used to justify intolerance toward Christianity. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
108:That kind always has the public good as a motive to justify every abomination. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
109:To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
110:Her existence alone was excuse enough to justify the creation of the entire world. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
111:The only works of righteousness that serve to justify a sinner are the works of Christ. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
112:There is no God for sure, else how could one justify terminal diseases in small kids? ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
113:There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
114:The term bubble should indicate a price that no reasonable future outcome can justify. ~ Cliff Asness, #NFDB
115:You can never really justify wages in the entertainment business, but it is what it is. ~ Gary Lineker, #NFDB
116:The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
117:It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it. ~ Stephen Sondheim, #NFDB
118:Never again will I justify the scars just because I loved the person holding the knife. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
119:This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusions. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
120:If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
121:Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex. ~ Daniel S Greenberg, #NFDB
122:Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
123:The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
124:We will always have enough reasons to justify what we believe and what we do not believe. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
125:Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence. ~ Hamza Yusuf, #NFDB
126:I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world. ~ Mackenzi Lee, #NFDB
127:it is the life of Muhammad to which Islamists appeal in order to justify their terrorism. ~ Nabeel Qureshi, #NFDB
128:Love lost by one moment’s explicit unfairness can’t be won back by trying to justify it ~ Lynne Reid Banks, #NFDB
129:That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did. ~ Max Barry, #NFDB
130:Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions. ~ Gustav Heinemann, #NFDB
131:I don't know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk, #NFDB
132:If God justify a man, who shall condemn him? But if God condemn him, who shall justify him? ~ Thomas Watson, #NFDB
133:One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
134:Power does not justify sin. Power is not virtue. Virtue is that which lasts inspite of power ~ Shinde Sweety, #NFDB
135:We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
136:Evil is not likely to result where people firmly believe that ends do not justify the means. ~ Roy Baumeister, #NFDB
137:So let’s accept what must be accepted, without letting our acceptance justify inaction. Don’t ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
138:To justify our likes and dislikes, we generally say that the work we dislike is not serious. ~ Walter Sickert, #NFDB
139:Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes. ~ Imelda Marcos, #NFDB
140:Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves? ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
141:[T]he end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary... ~ James Blish, #NFDB
142:think “majority” is one of my least favorite words. It’s so often used to justify bad decisions. ~ Emma Newman, #NFDB
143:If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
144:It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
145:Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought. ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
146:what do you bring to this enterprise to justify a third of the profits?” “Will,” said Iago. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
147:I think “majority” is one of my least favorite words. It’s so often used to justify bad decisions. ~ Emma Newman, #NFDB
148:Meetings were for wasting time, created by and for high-tone people to justify their existence. ~ Naomi Hirahara, #NFDB
149:Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs. ~ Richard Wright, #NFDB
150:Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
151:The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
152:The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
153:Man does not commit sin in unintentional deed,
but he might be the only one that could justify it. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
154:The primary battle which religion must fight today is the battle to justify its own existence. ~ Georgia Harkness, #NFDB
155:You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you. ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
156:But every time I told myself one lie, I had to tell another to justify the ones that came before it. ~ David Weber, #NFDB
157:Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence. ~ Friedrich Engels, #NFDB
158:If you like it, you'll find a way to justify it.
But if you don't , you'll find ways to falsify it. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
159:It’s one of humanity’s worst traits. Good intentions justify all kinds of terrible behavior.” Myron ~ Rachel Aaron, #NFDB
160:Once language becomes routinely distorted, it becomes increasingly easy to justify and promote evil ~ Holly Ordway, #NFDB
161:People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
162:Taken out of context and given a forty-degree twist, you can use the Bible to justify almost anything. ~ J A Jance, #NFDB
163:The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
164:If you have to justify an action, you probably shouldn’t have done it in the first place. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover, #NFDB
165:Moving to 100 percent renewable energy means we no longer need and can no longer justify wars for oil. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
166:We are looking for a Wealth Tax that will bring in sufficient revenue to justify having a wealth tax. ~ Dick Spring, #NFDB
167:Whether real or not, would-be authoritarians are primed to exploit crises to justify power grabs. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
168:A murder was never about brawn, it began and ended in the brain and the brain could justify anything. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
169:From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
170:It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
171:Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
172:The end doesn't always justify the means. But sometimes it does. Wisdom is knowing the difference. ~ Neal Shusterman, #NFDB
173:There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair. ~ Donella Meadows, #NFDB
174:we must renounce reading the Bible to find arguments to justify our behavior or that of our group. ~ Frank Schaeffer, #NFDB
175:I am just unwilling to justify my stay here by obnoxious behavior. I just do not have it in me anymore. ~ Laura Bates, #NFDB
176:I believe that it is an unchanging value of democracy that ends cannot justify the means in politics. ~ Park Geun hye, #NFDB
177:I haven’t needed anything big enough from you to justify being pleasant, and I doubt I ever will. ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
178:In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
179:The most dangerous aspect of religion is its tendency to glorify the absurd and justify the abhorrent. ~ Stifyn Emrys, #NFDB
180:We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God. ~ Don Henley, #NFDB
181:Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
182:I could justify violence only in this extreme case, to save the last living knowledge of Buddhism itself. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
183:...there are few truths important enough to justify paining and reproving others for not knowing them... ~ Montesquieu, #NFDB
184:There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
185:A Warrior knows that the ends do not justify the means. Because there are no ends, there are only means. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
186:Ever notice folks can justify damned near anything, 'cause they're always the heroes n their own stories? ~ Robin Furth, #NFDB
187:I’m still here, Ash. I can justify and explain my actions, but Maca’s not and I’ll never do that to him. ~ Lesley Jones, #NFDB
188:I think “majority” is one of my least favorite words. It’s so often used to justify bad decisions. Mack’s ~ Emma Newman, #NFDB
189:[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
190:I understand that the end does not justify the means. And this should be a lasting value for democracy. ~ Park Geun hye, #NFDB
191:The ease with which money
forgives bayonets and lies
to justify the massacre with reasoned arguments ~ Xiaobo Liu,#NFDB
192:The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
193:We use God to justify our actions when in fact it is our own instinct for survival that pushes us on. ~ Deborah Moggach, #NFDB
194:your experiences with a few battered babies and drug abusers does not justify your embrace of a monster. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
195:If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
196: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, #NFDB
197:Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
198:Our species is gifted where it comes to interpreting doctrine so as to justify whatever one wants to do. ~ Poul Anderson, #NFDB
199:The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
200:Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it--the only satisfactory theodicy! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
201:To justify one's actions is easy. Acting responsibly and being accountable for actions is very difficult. ~ Shubha Vilas, #NFDB
202:While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular, ~ Tony Horwitz, #NFDB
203:A Warrior knows that the ends do not justify the means. Because there are no ends, there are only means... ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
204:Don’t rush to justify yourself with a verbal argument; your choice of words may unmake what you made. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
205:In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
206:Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
207:People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
208:People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
209:The worst kind of lie—the kind shrouded in good intentions. The kind cowards use to justify their weakness. ~ Ren e Ahdieh, #NFDB
210:Besh grinned. “Only a fool would choose to justify himself by likening his actions to those of a bigger fool. ~ David B Coe, #NFDB
211:If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
212:life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
213:The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them. ~ George Friedman, #NFDB
214:How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
215: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, #NFDB
216:I know your hormones are raging right now, but that does not justify bumping off the creepy new kids in school! ~ Abra Ebner, #NFDB
217:Incurable diseases will eventually
force mankind to justify
disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
218:Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. ~ Arthur Miller, #NFDB
219:Life, woman, life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. ~ Arthur Miller, #NFDB
220:Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions. ~ Alexander Pushkin, #NFDB
221:The more exaggerated the musculature, the more it had to explain and justify itself in mounds of dead bodies. ~ Mark Simpson, #NFDB
222:The most insidious of sophisms are usually repeated to justify immodesty and seem to be the same everywhere. ~ Pope Pius XII, #NFDB
223:You are alive, and you don’t need to justify your existence. You can be the biggest mystery in your own story. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
224: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, #NFDB
225:No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe, #NFDB
226:What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it. ~ William Dietrich, #NFDB
227:Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
228:enforce obedience thereto. The object, on either side, doth not justify the means; for the lives of men are too ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
229:I am learning how to let my yes be yes and my no mean no without the need to justify why I choose to say either. ~ Lee Gutkind, #NFDB
230:I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
231:The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
232:Most recently, the Erdoğan government in Turkey used security crises to justify his tightening grip on power. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
233:The human heart is greedy; it will use religion, color, or any other excuse to justify its greed. Blame the human heart. ~ Bono, #NFDB
234: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, #NFDB
235:Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing. ~ Byron Katie, #NFDB
236:We want what we want. We don't need to justify it. And we can take it, we should. I want you, and I'm taking you. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
237:Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves. ~ Nicol s G mez D vila, #NFDB
238:I don't have to justify its awesomeness/activeness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours. ~ Lindy West, #NFDB
239: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, #NFDB
240:We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel. ~ Stephen Elliott, #NFDB
241:When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote. ~ Maajid Nawaz, #NFDB
242:Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
243:If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one. ~ Dick Gregory, #NFDB
244:I never justify, sustain, or in any way or to any extent uphold this cruel, heartless, aimless unnecessary war. ~ Franklin Pierce, #NFDB
245: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, #NFDB
246:action is the paramount thing. And certainly one should not use words to justify one’s own self-interest.” When ~ Joseph Telushkin, #NFDB
247:Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes them strive to justify themselves. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
248:Her not objecting, does not justify him. It only shows her being deficient in something herself -- sense or feeling. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
249: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, #NFDB
250: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, #NFDB
251:Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera. ~ Jean Luc Godard, #NFDB
252:Like all independent movies, the first thing you're looking for is a name actor who will justify your financing. ~ Steven Shainberg, #NFDB
253:Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions. ~ Alexander Pushkin, #NFDB
254:Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
255:Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,’ Ead said. ‘They can twist any teaching to justify their actions. ~ Samantha Shannon, #NFDB
256:Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,” Ead said. “They can twist any teaching to justify their actions. ~ Samantha Shannon, #NFDB
257:Even religion had to invent some kind of science for itself (Theology = The philosophy of divinity) To justify its existence. ~ Rius, #NFDB
258:Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
259:They are all just so many opportunities to justify your ways to man, by showing just how little circumstances amount to. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
260: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, #NFDB
261:Violence in ordinary Nature does not justify violence in a spiritual work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Anger and Violence, #NFDB
262:We live in days of assassins’—where evil is sought in lives more than good to justify a world with a bad conscience. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
263:What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley, #NFDB
264:Does the end justify the means? Or should it be, Do the ends justify the mean; do the extremes justify moderation? ~ Daniel N Robinson, #NFDB
265:If I’d had any level of success last night, then I could justify my actions; as it was, I couldn’t even fake being proud. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
266:It was amazing how the human mind could justify wrongdoing but balk at the very same thing when on the receiving end. ~ Brenda Barrett, #NFDB
267:Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. ~ Robert Pinsky, #NFDB
268:If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined. ~ David Horowitz, #NFDB
269:Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
270:The zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
271:To do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained will justify. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
272:To 'justify' means nothing else than to acquit of guilt him (her) who was accused as if his own innocence were confirmed. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
273:Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. ~ David Lodge, #NFDB
274:We don't tolerate terrorism. We go after the terrorists and those who support them and those who justify their actions. ~ Adel al Jubeir, #NFDB
275: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, #NFDB
276:I go to dance clubs...about once a year just to justify the other 364 days I spend in my apartment going 'God, what idiots!' ~ Bill Hicks, #NFDB
277: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, #NFDB
278:It’s disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it. ~ Allie Brosh, #NFDB
279:I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
280: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, #NFDB
281: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, #NFDB
282: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, #NFDB
283:Rational truth—and all truth is rational—is essentially that which can justify itself under criticism and in discussion. ~ R G Collingwood, #NFDB
284:When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
285: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, #NFDB
286: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, #NFDB
287:The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
288:Yes, somehow I'd reached the point of mental instability where I was making up excuses to justify my actions to my own brain. ~ Jeff Strand, #NFDB
289:Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
290:Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble. ~ Alan Perlis, #NFDB
291:As we noted previously, irresponsible thinkers first choose their conclusions and then seek out evidence to justify their choices ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
292: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, #NFDB
293: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, #NFDB
294:One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves. ~ Cortney S Warren, #NFDB
295:So we should never ask why in the sense of demanding that God explain or justify His actions or what He permits in our lives. ~ Jerry Bridges, #NFDB
296:We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
297:When we forgive someone, it doesn’t justify what they’ve done. It releases them into God’s hands so He can deal with them. ~ Stormie Omartian, #NFDB
298: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, #NFDB
299: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, #NFDB
300:I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started. ~ William Golding, #NFDB
301: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, #NFDB
302:Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers. ~ Martin Fowler, #NFDB
303:God will justify us from our sins, but he will not justify the least sin in us: "He is a God of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. ~ John Owen, #NFDB
304:I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
305:No one can understand monsters. No one can explain this evil. No one can ever justify them. But there are people who can catch them ~ V F Mason, #NFDB
306:The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement. ~ Germaine Greer, #NFDB
307:the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. ~ Chris Dietzel, #NFDB
308:War needs no gods, only mortal contestants, two enemies and whatever reasons they invent in order to justify killing each other. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
309: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, #NFDB
310: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, #NFDB
311:If and perhaps.... The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That's just people looking to justify their own lack of action. ~ John Flanagan, #NFDB
312: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, #NFDB
313: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, #NFDB
314:improving on the natural course if evolution—which, attendees argued, could be so cruel as to justify some sort of intervention. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
315:Once you feel jealous, you will justify all your wrong actions, because it clouds your discrimination, it clouds your wisdom. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
316:She reminded herself that this was exactly the sort of perk that would justify moving away from the familiar life she’d grown to love ~ Blake Pierce, #NFDB
317: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, #NFDB
318:Unfortunately, most of us are not that wise. We’re really not trying to be free of our stuff; we’re trying to justify keeping it. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
319:Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
320:It is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #NFDB
321:Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
322: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, #NFDB
323:People justify their own subservience to pleasure by citing men and women of the past who allegedly did the same things they are doing. ~ Ibn Khaldun, #NFDB
324:You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to has no sense of the arts. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
325:As men and women of character and of faith in the soundness of democratic methods, we must work like dogs to justify that faith. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
326:Every time I complete a major project I reward myself with two full days of just reading and coffee! I do justify that it is my work! ~ Delia J Colvin, #NFDB
327:Humans have a need to explain and justify everything; we have a need for knowledge, and we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
328: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, #NFDB
329:No prize , however great can justify an ounce of self deception or a small departure of the ugly facts. ( Notes from Underground) ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
330:Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we’ve started invoking national security and other shibboleths. ~ James K Morrow, #NFDB
331:We must never be drawn into sin by any thing that man can say or do to us, for it will not justify us to say that we were so drawn in. ~ Matthew Henry, #NFDB
332:You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
333:[Donald Trump] even quoted a tweet from a self-identified 16-year-old as a way to justify crazy unsupported claims about the popular vote. ~ Chuck Todd, #NFDB
334: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, #NFDB
335: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, #NFDB
336: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, #NFDB
337:Pray, speak, sir; to see your face, and not be able to read it, gives me a worse dread than I trust any words of yours will justify. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
338:She was the most private person I knew, not even telling herself what her feelings were until she found a logical reason to justify them. ~ Kim Harrison, #NFDB
339: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, #NFDB
340:In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. ~ Rainer Werner Fassbinder, #NFDB
341:The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other. ~ Charlie Jane Anders, #NFDB
342: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 Ruiz, #NFDB
343:In fact, I’m doubting that love exists. Maybe, as a society, we made it up to explain and justify our unhealthy desire for co-dependence.” He ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
344:Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
345:The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
346: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 Ruiz, #NFDB
347:fighting an endless war and getting nowhere, surrounded by those who found simply being in the war enough to justify their existence. He ~ Gordon R Dickson, #NFDB
348:I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
349:The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
350:They justify themselves with their inability; and the design and end of the law, as a school-master to fit them for Christ, is defeated. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
351:Ellen laughs, as we’ve both made fun of those nauseating Facebook posts that use a religious concept to justify their thinly veiled bragging. ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
352:It would be unjust to blame the past for choices made in the present. Nor can we justify present choices by invoking the sins of the past. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
353:But I got real tired of people using religion to suit their agendas. God became a mental genie that could be called upon to justify anything. ~ Peter Tieryas, #NFDB
354:Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves. ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB
355: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, #NFDB
356:he who discards his worldly duties can justify himself only by assuming some kind of responsibility toward a much larger family.” The ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
357: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, #NFDB
358:Let go of feelings of guilt and the need to justify your actions. To let go of guilt, it is enough to give yourself permission to be yourself. ~ Vadim Zeland, #NFDB
359:Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn’t seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
360: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, #NFDB
361: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, #NFDB
362:Nothing will ever justify some losses, but we can survive, even thrive, if we channel grief into purpose and never allow evil to hold the field. ~ James Comey, #NFDB
363:She'd take these random occurrences and elevate them to oracles; she'd pretend that they were enough to justify her actions.
Or lack therof. ~ Jodi Picoult,#NFDB
364: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, #NFDB
365: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, #NFDB
366:As we seek what is possible, we must also seek what is right, and we must not forget that even the most noble ends do not justify any means. ~ Charles W Colson, #NFDB
367: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, #NFDB
368: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, #NFDB
369:How the fuck do I know that my better is anything more than the great big fat lie we tell ourselves to justify the slow fat nothing of our days. ~ Claire North, #NFDB
370:In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
371:Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence. ~ Roy L Pickering Jr, #NFDB
372:There is so much relief and comfort in sharing truths with a dear friend—being with someone with whom you don’t have to justify everything. Her ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
373: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, #NFDB
374: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, #NFDB
375: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, #NFDB
376:A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
377:A man doesn't dream about a woman because he thinks her "mysterious"; he decides that she is "mysterious" to justify his dreaming of her. ~ Henry de Montherlant, #NFDB
378:Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence. ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
379:Give the agent something easy to reject, something to justify his authority - that way they won't look too closely at the rest of your things. ~ Robert Ferrigno, #NFDB
380:Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
381: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, #NFDB
382:..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, #NFDB
383:This is part of why I hate asking. It’s having to justify everything, not having the freedom any other human being has to earn and spend money. ~ Charmaine Pauls, #NFDB
384:We did what people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong. ~ James Frey, #NFDB
385: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, #NFDB
386:Being gay isn’t a choice. It’s part of who we are, but people have been saying being gay is a choice so they can justify their own hate and bigotry. ~ Andrew Grey, #NFDB
387:There is no need to justify your existence. You do not need to write or preach to justify yourselves, for instance. Being is its own justification. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
388: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, #NFDB
389:I can't justify to myself working less, even if you get more out of it. Even though, in practice, it does seem it would be better for me personally. ~ Chael Sonnen, #NFDB
390:I didn't think before that I'd done enough to justify publishing an autobiography but after 40 years in show business I'm now ready to tell my story. ~ Cilla Black, #NFDB
391:it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step. ~ Cass R Sunstein, #NFDB
392:It is very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
393: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, #NFDB
394: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. All ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
395: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, #NFDB
396:I think when you're reaching outside of something you're comfortable doing, you're just heading towards a light. I don't think you stop to justify it. ~ Sally Field, #NFDB
397:Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
398:One mustn’t justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat. ~ Courtney Milan, #NFDB
399:People do not take actions based on logic. We make choices based on emotion. Every one of us. Then we use what we call logic to justify our choices. ~ Kameron Hurley, #NFDB
400:The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans anyway, why bother going to all that work to justify it? When ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
401:We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong. ~ James Frey, #NFDB
402: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, #NFDB
403: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, #NFDB
404:64: Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble. ~ Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, 1982, #NFDB
405:To justify their avoidance of embarrassment, the whole profession tells the rest of us, based on “extensive scientific studies,” that black is white. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
406:And, indeed, this is one of the greatest mysteries in the world; namely, that a righteousness that resides in heaven should justify me, a sinner on earth! ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
407:In the quarantine tower he'd done to her what he'd sworn never to do with the machine: justify the route he'd taken with the result he hoped to achieve. ~ Meljean Brook, #NFDB
408:...the only thing that could justify your continuing existence on the planet would be if you started breathing carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. ~ Yrsa Sigur ard ttir, #NFDB
409:What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
410:A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
411: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, #NFDB
412:But neither can you 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,#NFDB
413: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, #NFDB
414:People fidget. They are compelled to look engaged in an activity, or purposeful. Vampires can just occupy space without feeling obliged to justify it. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
415:We require rules, standards, values— alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
416:He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
417: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, #NFDB
418:In a democratic nation, power must be linked with responsibility, and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
419: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, #NFDB
420: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, #NFDB
421:We require rules, standards, values— alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
422:A job pays you for what the role/designation does rather than for what you can do, which is why the compensation it pays doesn’t justify your capabilities. ~ Peter Tompkins, #NFDB
423:How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
424:Ideology is a sick-soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause. ~ Peter F Hamilton, #NFDB
425:In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
426: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, #NFDB
427: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, #NFDB
428: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, #NFDB
429:It was the last thing I ever said to her. A lie. The worst kind of lie --the kind shrouded in good intentions. The kind cowards use to justify their weakness. ~ Ren e Ahdieh, #NFDB
430: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, #NFDB
431:Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality. ~ John Twelve Hawks, #NFDB
432:Nothing can spiritually justify individual violence done in anger or passion or from any vital motive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, Essays on the Gita, #NFDB
433:The fact that people are in positions does not justify the means that they are leaders. A leader can be blind and to know this, check his sense of vision. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
434: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, #NFDB
435:Who can justify the expense of a six-lane highway through the middle of a small town that anticipates growth? Who would want such a road through their town? ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
436:Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously. ~ Carol Tavris, #NFDB
437:The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
438: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, #NFDB
439:Luther argues that when we fail to believe that God accepts us fully in Christ, and look to some other way to justify or prove ourselves, we commit idolatry. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
440:money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
441: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, #NFDB
442:L]iberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism ~ James Luther Adams, #NFDB
443:Sometimes, the ends did in fact justify the means. It was the height of moral folly to play by a set of self-imposed rules when your enemy played by none whatsoever. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
444:The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
445:Which is almost worse. Because at least when you’re sad you can mourn. Sadness you can battle. But anger? Anger we just justify until we’re miserable as hell. ~ Rachel Van Dyken, #NFDB
446:The worst part is not in making a mistake but in trying to justify it, instead of using it as a heaven-sent warning of our mindlessness or our ignorance. ~ Santiago Ramon y Cajal, #NFDB
447:Thus, he and his gun had been sent to do the deed, in the interests of national security, which seemed to be a catchall to justify any death, anywhere, any time. ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
448:Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. Asking me about violence is like going up to Vincente Minnelli and asking him to justify his musical sequences. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
449:Anybody can justify anything. It's what separates us from animals. It's a waste of time, though, isn't it-sitting around justifying when there's so much to be done? ~ John Brandon, #NFDB
450: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, #NFDB
451:I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
452:It seems to me that lawyers can justify almost anything to themselves as long as it's legal. But you can make anything legal when you put a gun to parliament's head. ~ Philip Kerr, #NFDB
453: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, #NFDB
454:On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence—through a curious transposition peculiar to our times—it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself. The ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
455: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, #NFDB
456: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, #NFDB
457:The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them. ~ Brit Bennett, #NFDB
458:The individual is a nut so impossible to crack that no theoretic tooth will be able to manage it. And so nothing will be able to justify your defeat, bumblers! ~ Witold Gombrowicz, #NFDB
459: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.
Gaiman, Neil ~ Neil Gaiman,#NFDB
460:hous vivons aux temps des assassins —“we live in days of assassins”—where evil is sought in lives more than good in order to justify a world with a bad conscience. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
461: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, #NFDB
462:Sunday is God's day, and he was committed to honoring it. Just because he was in Paris to compete in the Olympics didn't justify changing his lifelong commitment. ~ Craig Groeschel, #NFDB
463: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, #NFDB
464: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, #NFDB
465: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, #NFDB
466: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, #NFDB
467:Let it be our great concern to see on what terms we stand with our Bibles, whether they justify us or condemn us now; for the Judge of all will proceed by that rule. ~ Matthew Henry, #NFDB
468: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, #NFDB
469:It's said that people who give excuses for the reason not do something always formulate those excuses, waiting for the reason to surface to justify their excuses! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
470:Race has also become alive. Race was not only created to justify a racially exploitative economic system, it was invented to lock people of color into the bottom of it. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
471:...The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him.... ~ Karl Barth, #NFDB
472:I raised an eyebrow. Since when did they need real news to justify the slugfest? Barry gave me a knowing smile behind the assistant’s back as he ducked into his studio. ~ Marcia Clark, #NFDB
473:Patriotism has been used to justify the most horrific crimes in history because people more strongly identified as members of a group than as morally strong individuals. ~ Adam Kokesh, #NFDB
474:When we see the world through a computer virus, it is easy to justify the cruelest behavior. What we don’t see is that misuse of our word is putting us deeper into hell. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
475: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, #NFDB
476:But if you have an unmessianic sense of nondestiny, this is unlikely to be a problem: you won’t consider yourself important enough to justify breaking a solemn, public vow. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
477: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, #NFDB
478: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, #NFDB
479:It usually turned out that the people who claim they're looking to change their lives are really looking for a way to justify making the same mistakes over and over. ~ Stephen McCauley, #NFDB
480: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, #NFDB
481:I felt strongly that since the pursuit of good science was so difficult it was essential that the problem being studied was an important one to justify the effort expanded. ~ Paul Nurse, #NFDB
482: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, #NFDB
483:The word genocide shares its root with gene—and for good reason: the Nazis used the vocabulary of genes and genetics to launch, justify, and sustain their agenda. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
484:But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready to distort the truth, ready to hear nor see anything, as long as he can justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
485:Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
486: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, #NFDB
487: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, #NFDB
488:Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them? Do our pasts determine what we deserve in the future? And is it ever possible to leave your past behind? ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
489: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, #NFDB
490:If someone says, "Katie, you are out of order," over something I've said, or, "Katie, you are wrong," if I defend myself or justify myself, then I have just started the war. ~ Byron Katie, #NFDB
491:Self expression is a tricky
thing. Just as you start to feel
comfortable with yourself after years
of not, you then have to justify
yourself to other people. ~ Yrsa Daley Ward,#NFDB
492: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, #NFDB
493:You can justify your refusal to come to God because of scandals. So did the soldiers. It was an awful scandal that Christ the Son of God should swing impotent from a peg. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
494: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, #NFDB
495:Some presentation authors justify this by saying, “The photographer already knew it was going to be an uncredited effort and it really isn’t that hard to take a good photograph. ~ Neal Ford, #NFDB
496:Some slogans of modern political revolutionaries—“ Make America Great Again”—echo the way that Akhenaten and other pharaohs manipulated nostalgia in order to justify change. ~ Peter Hessler, #NFDB
497:Thus was born an astonishing new idea that governments justify their existence only by promoting possibilities for prosperity and happiness among all those they rule over. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
498:What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
499:Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
500:For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me. ~ Antonella Gambotto Burke, #NFDB
501: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, #NFDB
502:It struck her that the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilization will split before it can reach any goal that could justify its expenditure of effort. ~ Rebecca West, #NFDB
503:Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
504:Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB
505:biology is usually called upon to justify a society based on selfish principles, but we should never forget that it has also produced the glue that holds communities together. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
506: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, #NFDB
507:There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don't try to justify them. They can't be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
508:There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
509: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, #NFDB
510: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, #NFDB
511: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, #NFDB
512:Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
513:She feared so many things. Too many to want to count them. Some she would not even want to try to justify.
But his touch?
Surprisingly, this was not one of them . . . ~ Marilyn Brant,#NFDB
514:There are some people who wait eagerly for the fall of a just man so they can use his fall to justify their flaws, but Proverbs twenty four sixteen shall always stand! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
515:simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
516: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, #NFDB
517:As theologians, we must say more than we can be in the hope that others will make us more than we are. What is crucial is that we not write to justify the limits of our lives. ~ Stanley Hauerwas, #NFDB
518:Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
519: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, #NFDB
520: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, #NFDB
521:We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don’t mean to, that’s how our brain is wired. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
522: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, #NFDB
523: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, #NFDB
524: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, #NFDB
525: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, #NFDB
526: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, #NFDB
527: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, #NFDB
528: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, #NFDB
529: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, #NFDB
530:Ultimately, suffering is always political with all kinds of justifications - there are those who justify Israel's occupation of land as being a fulfillment of what God had promised. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
531:Do you think it happens in real life? Pheromones and all that crap. Is it a bullshit theory some horndog dreamed up so he could justify why he’s attracted to his mother or some shit? ~ Elle Kennedy, #NFDB
532: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, #NFDB
533:Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
534: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, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, #NFDB
535: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, #NFDB
536:In the same period, scientists around the world were working to justify the continued subjugation of women and nonwhites by making medical claims as to their inferior capabilities. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
537:The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
538: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 Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
539: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, #NFDB
540:If we surrender faith in Christ, as the only thing that can justify us, the death and resurrection of Jesus are without meaning; that Christ is the Savior of the world would be a myth. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
541: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. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
542: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, #NFDB
543: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, #NFDB
544:Try as I might, I can’t justify getting caught up in controversy, whether it’s true or not. I can’t allow myself to be swallowed up again. There’s a chance I’d never find my way back out. ~ Holly Hall, #NFDB
545: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, #NFDB
546:We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
547:All technical professionals have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated than they are so that they can justify the high fees their members charge them for their services. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
548:all technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated than they really are so that they can justify the high fees their members charge for their services. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
549: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, #NFDB
550: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, #NFDB
551: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, #NFDB
552: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, #NFDB
553:I have clearly said we faced terrorist enemies who use Islam to justify slaughtering innocent people and we have to stop them and we will. We have to defeat radical jihadist terrorism. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
554:The cash turned heavy in my hands offering salvation as well as condemnation. Was it wrong to use someone else’s money if I needed it? Who had the power to justify who deserved it most? ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
555: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, #NFDB
556: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,#NFDB
557:She had been searching for a way to justify her own choices. It was the first time I realized that we all bend and shape our stories to fit our own ends. It was certainly no the last. ~ Greer Macallister, #NFDB
558: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, #NFDB
559:The first duty of an officer—whether a lieutenant or a captain or the Commander in Chief—is to the enlisted men. That was a basic principle of command. He could not justify not calling up ~ W E B Griffin, #NFDB
560:To justify Christianity 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, ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
561: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, #NFDB
562: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, #NFDB
563:It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called "human nature" - the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
564:... once you start demonizing groups of people, when you make them the other, you can justify doing just about anything you want to the, can't you? Look at history if you don't believe me. ~ Brunonia Barry, #NFDB
565:simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
566: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, #NFDB
567:We justify our heartless calls by our commitment to one day defeat all our enemies so the people can live the remainder of their days in peace and prosperity. We’ve become politicians. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
568: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, #NFDB
569:But none of that is possible,” he continued, “if my heart is at war. A heart at war needs enemies to justify its warring. It needs enemies and mistreatment more than it wants peace. ~ The Arbinger Institute, #NFDB
570:But the worst type of darkness is the kind we keep in our hearts… we treasure it, hold it dear, allow it to help us justify our actions, and when it’s too late, we blame it for everything ~ Rachel Van Dyken, #NFDB
571: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, #NFDB
572:Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis. ~ John Keegan, #NFDB
573:She’s fifteen. She sees what she wants to see in order to justify brooding. I’m not saying what happened to her is easy, but teenage girls will find a reason to brood even when there isn’t one. ~ Vi Keeland, #NFDB
574:Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of ~ Charles Lindbergh, #NFDB
575:Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
576:relieved no one of the obligation to judge right from wrong. But it did require subjecting the past to skepticism, to look to beginnings not to justify ends, but to question them—with evidence. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
577:There are people who will tell you that the ends justify the means, right up until they’re talking about their own ends. Then, suddenly, morals and ethics matter. Funny thing, that. —Dr. Shannon ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
578:You know the whole ‘I swear, I never do this sort of thing’ speech that some women give, even though they shouldn’t feel like they have to, since men never feel the need to justify the same thing? ~ S E Hall, #NFDB
579:...although the reason for the existence of women is obvious enough, nobody has any real idea what point there is in being a man. Men have however, made many attempts to justify their existence. ~ Steve Jones, #NFDB
580:Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. Tactfully, ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
581:Business is business. It’s not always easy, but the outcome is fairly predictable. Relationships are messy. You have no data, no statistics. Nothing to justify taking the leap, except for emotion. ~ J S Scott, #NFDB
582:But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that. ~ Stacia Kane, #NFDB
583:Every theory of social action is ultimately a philosophy of history. It attempts, as best it may, to read in the experience of mankind the lessons which would justify its own special urgency. ~ Harold J Laski, #NFDB
584:What he described reminded me more of a guy who fell for a girl at first glance, but due to his fucked upbringing, transformed it into something else in his mind entirely to justify his attraction ~ V F Mason, #NFDB
585: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, #NFDB
586:Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
587:No injury I could imagine would justify the repulsive clamor coming from the revelers. They sounded like sheep who had been lobotomized and then beaten with heavy clubs festooned with fishhooks. ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
588: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, #NFDB
589:Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
590: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,#NFDB
591: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,#NFDB
592:For to kill a man in a fair fight, is to prove that you are superior to him in strength or skill; and to justify the deed, you must assume that the right of the stronger is really a right. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
593:But Mari, I just don’t think I can justify a show-offish wedding. I’ve never been that sort of girl. I’m the ‘Let’s go to a third-world country and take care of orphans’ kind of girl, you know? ~ Janice Thompson, #NFDB
594:Football teams that lost their matches can have many other chances to play in successive seasons; but a soul that is lost through death may not have the chance to justify its potential again! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
595: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, #NFDB
596: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, #NFDB
597:They all fell silent, baffled by a new world order in which ideological and religious beliefs were used to justify violence and atrocities against innocent people going about their daily business. ~ Leslie Meier, #NFDB
598:This construct of the licentious temptress served to justify white men’s sexual abuse of Black women. The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers. The ~ Dorothy Roberts, #NFDB
599: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, #NFDB
600: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, #NFDB
601:Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
602:...(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, #NFDB
603:Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
604: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, #NFDB
605:Our problem is to discover a principle of differentiation and yet relationship lucid enough to justify and to purify both scientific and philosophical knowledge by accepting their mutual independence. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
606:But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
607: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, #NFDB
608:One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
609:Part of that change is forgiveness and the willingness to look at our lives and the world differently. Ask yourself ‘Do I really want to change or do I just want to justify staying the way that I am? ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
610: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, #NFDB
611:In every job, I would justify it in my mind, whether I loved it or hated it, that I was getting paid to learn and every experience would be of value when I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. ~ Mark Cuban, #NFDB
612: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, #NFDB
613:Slavery was so brutal and devastating, Europeans looked for ways to justify themselves. For a while they used the argument that the Africans were pagans, savages, heathens in need of salvation. ~ Patricia C McKissack, #NFDB
614:Such explanations assume that some good outcome can nullify or justify the pain, but this is not so. A tragedy is still a tragedy; pain is still pain, even if some insight is gained in the process. We ~ Kelly M Kapic, #NFDB
615:The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom.
Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality. ~ Tony Judt,#NFDB
616:There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: "But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it." Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
617: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. If we try to change them, this means we don’t really like them. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
618:But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
619: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,#NFDB
620: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, #NFDB
621:I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. ~ Ralph Ellison, #NFDB
622: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, #NFDB
623:Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man’s agony.”208 Berger sees the brilliance of ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
624:Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
625:The doctrine stating signs and wonders are no longer needed because we have the Bible was created by people who hadn’t seen God’s power and needed an explanation to justify their own powerless churches. ~ Bill Johnson, #NFDB
626:The knowledge of God’s Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism (1 Cor. 8:1-3). This causes us to justify ourselves rather than repent of the unforgiveness. ~ John Bevere, #NFDB
627:After a while, you're staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it's just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
628:I am not going to apologize for speaking the Name of Jesus, I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put in me. If I have to sacrifice everything... I will. ~ Rachel, #NFDB
629:[...] 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, #NFDB
630:...Javel saw evil in those bright blue eyes, not malevolence but something much worse: an evil born of lack of self-awareness, an evil that didn't know it was evil and therefore could justify anything. ~ Erika Johansen, #NFDB
631: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, #NFDB
632: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, #NFDB
633:I think violence can never be justified. At the same time, nobody’s culture or beliefs should be insulted, that’s not something I can accept either. But I cannot justify or accept any violence at all. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
634: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, #NFDB
635: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, #NFDB
636:A gigantic, bloated government has to keep itself busy in order to justify its existence; hence, you have more regulations and meddling in the affairs of the people, whether they request it, need it, or not. ~ Ben Carson, #NFDB
637:But that kind of thinking . . . you could turn it into an argument for killing anyone at any time. You could justify sending kids into the Hunger Games to prevent the districts from getting out of line, ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
638: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, #NFDB
639:You are the worst kind of liar. You justify your actions. If you see a need, your arrogance precludes you from ever considering that there may be an alternative aside from your scheming and manipulations. ~ Sophie Jordan, #NFDB
640: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, #NFDB
641: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, #NFDB
642: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, #NFDB
643:A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
644:A primary function of the Strict Father model is the protection of innocent children. Opposition to abortion provides an ideal opportunity to assert a protective function and justify Strict Father morality. ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
645:Jews participated in the ownership of human beings right up through to the nineteenth century, and biblical texts were quoted by some Civil War–era American rabbis to justify the South’s “peculiar institution. ~ Leo Rosten, #NFDB
646: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, #NFDB
647:These attacks can be consequential: If the public comes to share the view that opponents are linked to terrorism and the media are spreading lies, it becomes easier to justify taking actions against them. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
648:Anytime the Bible is used to justify the oppression and exploitation of others, we have strayed far from the God who brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, “out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
649:compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral, and more apt to form stereotypical views of outsiders. ~ Richard Wiseman, #NFDB
650:Forgiven? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and don't attempt to justify myself. It's not my husband but myself I have deceived. And not only just now; I have been deceiving myself for a long time. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
651:learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
652: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, #NFDB
653:The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view only do so in order to justify their own loose lives. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
654:They could justify our abuse simply because we were something they were not. At least in appearance. And such difference, particularly in color, undoubtedly equaled a fundamental inequity in their minds. None ~ Daniel Black, #NFDB
655:Unfortunately, their approach was based on the traditional dating paradigm, which I had previously abandoned on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
656:Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement. ~ Germaine Greer, #NFDB
657: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, #NFDB
658: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, #NFDB
659:You said I know that this will hurt
But if I don't break your heart
Then things will just get worse
If the burden seems too much to bear
Remember, the end will justify the pain it took to get us there ~ Relient K,#NFDB
660:Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad’s decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
661: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, #NFDB
662:It was sunny, a rarity for Indiana in April, and everyone at the farmers' market was wearing short sleeves even though the temperature didn't quite justify it. We Hoosiers are excessively optimistic about summer. ~ John Green, #NFDB
663:People don't need to find reasons to justify their not giving. What they need to find is the inspiration to give. And those who don't, but could afford to, are missing out on one of wealth's greatest luxuries. ~ Andrew Tobias, #NFDB
664:The American id could not be educated, Spinks thought. It needed horror in order to stay awake and to justify its most pleasureful pursuit, the destruction of helpless people who had never done anything wrong. ~ Paul La Farge, #NFDB
665: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, #NFDB
666: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, #NFDB
667:Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing 'natural' differences don't stay in the realm of advertising and marketing--they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage. ~ Andi Zeisler, #NFDB
668:This might be the price of vengeance, she thinks. You have to spend the rest of your life living inside the memories of the worst things done to you so you can constantly justify what you did to avenge them. ~ Christopher Rice, #NFDB
669:This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to pass. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
670:* Gen. 19:1–11; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:26–28; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; 1 Tim. 1:9–10 are known as the “clobber verses” of Scripture, used by nonaffirming Christians to justify prohibitions against the LGBTQ community. ~ John Pavlovitz, #NFDB
671: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, #NFDB
672:if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
673:In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
674:Let's realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let's realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
675: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, #NFDB
676:compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral and have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders. ~ Richard Wiseman, #NFDB
677:I cannot justify my actions. Roldero had said that men must be judged by their deeds, not their motives. I offer such speculation only n the hope that by understanding our motives we may thus control our deeds. ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
678: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, #NFDB
679:Let’s realize that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
680:Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
681:Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
682:He had learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
683:if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
684: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, #NFDB
685:Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way. ~ Nick Mason, #NFDB
686:He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
687:My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
688:Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities. ~ Brad S Gregory, #NFDB
689:To justify being listened to, I try to be as well informed as I can. Hence, the travel. Reading is good too. Reading gets you part way there, and I do read pretty voraciously for a guy who's trying to write so much. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
690: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, #NFDB
691: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, #NFDB
692: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, #NFDB
693: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, #NFDB
694: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, #NFDB
695:Let’s realize that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
696:O the sweet exchange, O the incomprehensible work of God, O the unexpected blessings, that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous man, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners! ~ Thomas R Schreiner, #NFDB
697: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, #NFDB
698:He had learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational. And ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
699: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, #NFDB
700:The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
701:Throughout history the conquerors have always treated the conquered this way. The bad ones need to believe we're inferior to justify the way they treat us. If they only could realize that we're all the same. ~ Michelle Cohen Corasanti, #NFDB
702: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,#NFDB
703: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, #NFDB
704:The healthy introvert understands that their personality is not a deterministic, fixed reality that they are powerless against. Being an introvert is never an excuse to shirk responsibility or to justify bad habits. ~ Jamie Arpin Ricci, #NFDB
705: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, #NFDB
706:We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and other people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
707:You are using frightful means to justify ends that you think are for the good of the most people. Your ends may well be right—I think I believe in the same ends—but you cannot use people as your pawns, Atticus. You cannot. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
708: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, #NFDB
709:Making LDL the “bad cholesterol” oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades’ worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
710:not to believe what she’d said. She had been searching for a way to justify her own choices. It was the first time I realized that we all bend and shape our stories to fit our own ends. It was certainly not the last. ~ Greer Macallister, #NFDB
711:That the Negroes were enslaved more than other races, and on a large scale, is evidently a result of their being, in contrast to other races, inferior in intelligence - which, however, does not justify such slavery ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
712: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, #NFDB
713: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, #NFDB
714:It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living? ~ Sarah Schulman, #NFDB
715:Asked whether donor nations may be becoming fatigued ... The fatigue may be there, but I don't think we can justify it in the face of such misery. We may need to wake up our conscience and our conscience must force us to act. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
716:Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
717: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, #NFDB
718:Pakistan’s unfortunate history may justify the description of Pakistan as being ‘insufficiently imagined’, but imagination is by definition not a finite process. An entity that is insufficiently imagined can be reimagined ~ Husain Haqqani, #NFDB
719:As this chapter has shown, we are in the midst of an emergency in which appalling suffering is being inflicted on millions of animals for purposes that on any impartial view are obviously inadequate to justify the suffering. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
720:Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means. If they evaluate their methods by the same lofty standards by which they judge their goals and purposes, evil will be held in check. ~ Roy F Baumeister, #NFDB
721: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, #NFDB
722:If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
723: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, #NFDB
724:Javel saw evil in those bright blue eyes, not malevolence but something much worse: an evil born of lack of self-awareness, an evil that didn’t know it was evil and therefore could justify anything. Evil that did the math. ~ Erika Johansen, #NFDB
725:To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
726:A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be). ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
727:The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means. ~ Roy F Baumeister, #NFDB
728:We all know people who say: "It's the principle of the matter" to justify sustaining toxic emotions for years. As they hold onto their anger or hurt, they bleed away their energy reserves, often ending up bitter and depressed. ~ Doc Childre, #NFDB
729:Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it responds to the worries that gnaw at them and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
730:Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
731: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, #NFDB
732:If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An ‘ideology’ is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
733: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, #NFDB
734:Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. There are always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living. That’s why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
735: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, #NFDB
736:Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith.... Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
737:We justify murder every day. What do you think about all those Iraqi civilians killed in the war? All those Afghans? Just collateral damage, right? Not really murder? But weren’t they sacrificed so Americans could feel more secure? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
738: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. ~ John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book I, line 22, #NFDB
739:She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require. ~ E M Delafield, #NFDB
740: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, #NFDB
741: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, #NFDB
742: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, #NFDB
743:The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
744:Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can - social, biological, what have you. ~ Elizabeth Bear, #NFDB
745: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, #NFDB
746:Over-intellectualizing can justify practically anything. Reason has reasons that can create holocausts. In the 20th century, we have certainly seen how much killing and disaster has been championed with superb intellectual reasons. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
747:There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
748:war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic. But once you take sides, you have lost that ability. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
749:This,' opening another door, 'is my chamber. I read here when the family suppose I have retired to rest. Sometimes I injure my health rather more than I can quite justify to myself, by doing so; but art is long and time is short. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
750:Can't you try>? However useless the effort may seem to you to be, have you anything better to do with your life? Have you some worthier goal? Have you a purpose that will justify you in your own eyes to some greater extent? ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
751:It would take a cosmic level of cynicism to accuse Muslim scholars of feigning entirely their commitment to preserving the Prophet’s Sunna and concocting the vast body of Hadiths out of whole cloth to justify received practice. ~ Jonathan A C Brown, #NFDB
752: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, #NFDB
753:Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision. ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
754:There is evil in the world. Things might be easier if there wasn’t, if good and evil were just concepts men invented to justify themselves; we could ignore them, then. Sadly, good and evil are both very real, and very inconvenient. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
755: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, #NFDB
756:Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations. ~ Rivers Solomon, #NFDB
757: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, #NFDB
758:Nothing about the “divine right of kings,” the “will of the people,” or the “rule of law” has the power to justify an immoral act. Violent enforcers are essential to governments because without them, their threats would be meaningless. ~ Adam Kokesh, #NFDB
759:The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
760: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, #NFDB
761:Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
762:Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
763:Everything we’ve got, or so we think, comes from natural talent and hard work. But with other people, we are quick to ascribe to them all kinds of Machiavellian tactics. This allows us to justify whatever we do, no matter the results. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
764:Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you. ~ Charles Todd, #NFDB
765:History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
766:I held out my sisters' letters for him to read. Tears appeared in his eyes, and he kissed the letters and declared, "I love your sisters! It shall be the object of my life to justify the trust shown in these letters. May God bless them. ~ Nancy Moser, #NFDB
767: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, #NFDB
768:N O consideration will justify the framers of the Federal Constitution and the administration of the Government, in withholding a recognition of the Lord and His anointed from the grand charter of the nation.”—Rev. Alexander McLeod, D. D. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
769:One did not need to believe in the Force to know right from wrong. Many who held no faith in the Force acted righteously, and he had known more than one sentient who had acted selfishly, even cruelly, and used belief to justify doing so. ~ Greg Rucka, #NFDB
770:Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that ‘the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it’. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
771:We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other. ~ Charlie Jane Anders, #NFDB
772:Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. Less is more and usually more effective. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
773:All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
774:On Saturday, my parents and I went down to the farmers’ market in Broad Ripple. It was sunny, a rarity for Indiana in April, and everyone at the farmers’ market was wearing short sleeves even though the temperature didn’t quite justify it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
775:Whatever defamation of character my enemies are spreading about me, I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm. ~ Toussaint Louverture, #NFDB
776:I'm 20 years old. I like to party as much as anyone my age. Going clubbing is my way of relaxing or releasing a lot of stress. I don't feel that I should have to justify that part of my life. I don't know that I'm necessarily an addict. ~ Lindsay Lohan, #NFDB
777:Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wrong, we might well get a lot closer. ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
778: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, #NFDB
779:keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we’ve made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones. ~ Barry Schwartz, #NFDB
780:Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
781:Life was so fucking unfair at times. She had the thing I wanted more than anything—even worse, she got it by accident when I had been trying for years. And I had what she wanted: infertility, the perfect excuse to justify a child-free life. ~ Karma Brown, #NFDB
782:Atheistic evolutionists believe that nothing created everything - a scientific impossibility. It couldn't happen. So they redefine the word 'nothing' to mean 'something,' so that in their unthinking minds, they can justify their foolishness. ~ Ray Comfort, #NFDB
783:But the price of error is
higher for you than it is for
your countrymen, and so
that America might justify
itself, the story of a black
body’s destruction must
always begin with his or
her error, real or imagined... ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,#NFDB
784: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, #NFDB
785: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, #NFDB
786: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, #NFDB
787:It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well. ~ Brian D McLaren, #NFDB
788:Memmi believes racism has four elements—an insistence on difference, a negative valuation of that difference, the generalization of that difference to an entire group, and finally the use of that difference to justify hostility and aggression. ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
789:these studies were expensive, and one way to justify the expense was to generate evidence that supported the official advice to avoid fat. If the evidence didn’t support the recommendations, then the task was to interpret it so that it did.*16 ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
790:Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.” On ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
791: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, #NFDB
792:She understood that the Republic faced desperate times. She just wondered how many desperate measures that could justify. Somehow it seemed an affront to the Force to do this to fellow humans, even if they seemed remarkably sanguine about it. ~ Karen Traviss, #NFDB
793: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, #NFDB
794: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, #NFDB
795:If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
796:What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
797: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, #NFDB
798:It's the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
799: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, #NFDB
800: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, #NFDB
801:How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved ax -- then have to justify its wisdom.
But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,#NFDB
802:Truth is never perfect, never squares with all expectations. Truth always poses doubts and questions. Only lies are one hundred percent believable, because they don't need to justify reality, they simply have to tell us what we want to hear. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
803:Truth is never perfect, never squares with all expectations. Truth always poses doubts and questions. Only lies are one hundred percent believable, because they don’t need to justify reality, they simply have to tell us what we want to hear. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
804:we justify all the time, effort, suffering, and years and years that we devote to something by telling ourselves and others that there must be something worthwhile and important about it or we never would have so much of our lives sunk into it. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
805:You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
806: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, #NFDB
807:Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
808:You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
809:he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
810:In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
811:Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
812:The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living. ~ Claude Levi Strauss, #NFDB
813:Men may make progress, but man never changes. Man loves power and money. No matter the skin color, religion or income level. These symbols of our nation make men drunk with power, who then justify their lust for more by claiming they are public servants. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
814:Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, like most of the population of Europe. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
815:This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherrypicking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war. * ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
816: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, #NFDB
817:I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A. I wouldn't say it's the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
818:On April 6, after more than three months of repairs, she finally weighed anchor and unfurled her sails. The ship carried a full load of spices, one thousand quintals of cloves—fifty tons!—more than enough to justify the expense of the entire voyage. ~ Laurence Bergreen, #NFDB
819:Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
820: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. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
821:When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
822:If Congress is going to investigate baseball players about whether or not they told the truth, how can we justify giving the most powerful intelligence official, [James] Clapper, a pass? This is how J. Edgar Hoover ended up in charge of the FBI forever. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
823: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, #NFDB
824: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, #NFDB
825: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, #NFDB
826:Romance… affection… these are what give our lives value. They justify all the suffering of life. My goal is to always reinvent heroic romances and present larger-than-life characters that will inspire readers to fall in love and expand their own lives. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
827:Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public? ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
828:There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB
829:[W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form. ~ John Keegan, #NFDB
830:If we fear work because we’re scared it won’t matter in the end, the work we do ends up not mattering. We keep ourselves busy with to-do lists to feel productive or we justify watching TV all day. Either way, we never get to where we’re trying to go. ~ Allison Vesterfelt, #NFDB
831:I love the church. It is the body of Christ. It nurtures my soul and aids in my sanctification. But the church cannot redeem me. Christ and Christ alone can save me. The sacraments are precious to me. They edify and strengthen me, but they cannot justify me. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
832:In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
833: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, #NFDB
834: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, #NFDB
835: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,#NFDB
836: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 G Finkelstein, #NFDB
837: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, #NFDB
838:The central aspect I wanted to explore was the path a person takes to get to the point where they can justify doing terrible things in the name of good. What motivations sway them? What stones laid in childhood become the foundation legacies are built on? ~ Kiersten White, #NFDB
839:The only way to reduce our national debt is to grow the economy and cut spending. We have no idea how our money is being spent. As president, I will move all agencies to zero-based budgeting so that every agency has to justify every dollar that they spend. ~ Carly Fiorina, #NFDB
840: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, #NFDB
841: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, #NFDB
842:The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
843:When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live. ~ Sarah Kendzior, #NFDB
844:Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position. ~ Gary Oldman, #NFDB
845:Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. ~ Alveda King, #NFDB
846: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, #NFDB
847:Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now? ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
848:The euphoric episode is protected and sustained by the will of those who are involved, in order to justify the circumstances that are making them rich. And it is equally protected by the will to ignore, exorcise, or condemn those who express doubts. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
849:There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
850:We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
851: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, #NFDB
852: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, #NFDB
853: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, #NFDB
854:A healthy self-love means we have no compulsion to justify to ourselves or others why we take vacations, why we sleep late, why we buy new shoes, why we spoil ourselves from time to time. We feel comfortable doing things which add quality and beauty to life. ~ Andrew Matthews, #NFDB
855:O gods, spare me the sight of this thankless breed, these politicians who cringe for favors from a screaming mob and do not care what harm they do their friends, providing they can please a crowd! Tell me, on what feeble grounds can you justify your vote of death? ~ Euripides, #NFDB
856:Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
857:There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and other people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
858: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, #NFDB
859:The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1 ~ Charles Murray, #NFDB
860: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, #NFDB
861:I’ll tell you one thing you didn’t learn from him: talking the way you’re talking now. There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
862:Natural” is a word that invites suspicion. It should always present itself in quotation marks, A sign that its meaning is slippery. Humans can justify almost anything by calling it natural. Naturalness is the pervasive myth—the one to root out of your head. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg, #NFDB
863:The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
864:They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Not always, but at least occasionally, it can break our obsession with the self. ~ Kiran Nagarkar, #NFDB
865: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, #NFDB
866:It's foolish to trump up stories about how primitive humans built pyramids, stone henge or other ancient giant structures. The only logical explanation is...those relics ain't built by human kind. It is easier to admit this pity explanation than to justify otherwise. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
867:Seeing when you justify yourself & blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but ...a chance to see that you’re holding on to your interpretation of reality; it allows you to reflect that that’s all it is...[It's] just your interpretation of reality. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
868: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, #NFDB
869: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, #NFDB
870: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, #NFDB
871:While nobody can pretend that Christian religious practice is thriving in most of Europe, the situation is nothing as grim as some recent accounts suggest, nor do the population statistics justify the portrait of a wholesale barbarian invasion from Muslim lands. ~ Philip Jenkins, #NFDB
872:A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
873: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, #NFDB
874:Grace can pardon our ungodliness and justify us with Christ's righteousness; it can put the Spirit of Jesus Christ within us; it can help us when we are down; it can heal us when we are wounded; it can multiply pardons, as we through frailty multiply transgressions. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
875:Greenspan’s actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
876:It is to be feared that very many have little knowledge of the main enemy that they carry about them in their bosoms. This makes them ready to justify themselves, and to be impatient of reproof or admonition, not knowing that they are in any danger. 2 Chronicles 16:10 ~ John Owen, #NFDB
877: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. Alcohol seems to both calm me down and elevate my mood, a paradoxical but pleasant combination. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
878:None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
879: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, #NFDB
880: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, #NFDB
881: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, #NFDB
882:When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
883:Your theology won't always work toward your obedience, because your use of theology is dictated by the condition of your heart. If your heart is not submitting to the plan of God, you will actually use your theology to justify things that should not be justified. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
884: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, #NFDB
885:A third reason was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; namely, passages from letters attributed to Paul endorse slavery, subordinate women, and condemn homosexual behavior. They have been used for much of Christian history to justify systems of oppression. As ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
886:Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
887:I knew that I was not doing anything wrong, and I knew in my mind I was doing the right thing. I knew that the people who were going against me were not going against me for a good purpose. I knew that they were trying to justify their corruption and misgovernance. ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
888: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, #NFDB
889: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, #NFDB
890: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, #NFDB
891: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,#NFDB
892:You have the subconscious mind that sometimes is attracting tragedy, attracting bad things, because you want to be a victim. Because to be a victim is to justify a lot of frustrations and failures in your life... You want to be successful? The universe is helping you. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
893: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, #NFDB
894:This boy was so far out of my league it was embarrassing. I found myself staring at him, trying to find some minute flaw that might justify dragging him back to my level. Finding nothing, I decided that having a dimple on only one cheek was practically a deformity. ~ G J Walker Smith, #NFDB
895:Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
896: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, #NFDB
897: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, #NFDB
898: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, #NFDB
899: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, #NFDB
900: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, #NFDB
901: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, #NFDB
902:There is nothing so merciless as mankind. How can we justify ourselves, especially to the dumb animals around us? But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love. ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness, #NFDB
903:Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
904:Giving reasons during conflict to justify or defend a viewpoint is just as manipulative as giving reasons to attack that viewpoint. Neither of these routes is an honest assertive I want that can lead to a workable compromise of interests to quickly resolve the conflict. ~ Manuel J Smith, #NFDB
905:I’ll tell you one thing you didn’t learn from him: talking the way you’re talking now. There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it.” Michael ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
906:We all act because we’re sure of what we want, and we believe that the actions we perform will get us what we want, but we never know anything for sure, and so all our rationales are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
907:beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
908: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, #NFDB
909:We despise the grace of God when we observe the Law for the purpose of being justified. The Law is good, holy, and profitable, but it does not justify. To keep the Law in order to be justified means to reject grace, to deny Christ, to despise His sacrifice, and to be lost. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
910:How, then, was she--his wife, who'd taken a vow to remain with him in sickness and in health--supposed to justify ending the marriage and breaking up their family after everything they have been through? When all she really wanted was the man she'd once believed him to be ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
911: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, #NFDB
912:When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
913:A teacher must read. How can a teacher justify not reading? A teacher must love books. You people are making a tragic mistake in your school leadership by placing people who do not read into positions of authority.
Cag the alien in "Them"
William W. Johnstone ~ William W Johnstone,#NFDB
914:He had learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational. And whatever else he was, Reacher knew he was a rational man. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
915:They were all milling about in clusters, a kind of colloidal motion made up of groups—some doing question and answer, some forensics, and others just staring around for something important to do to justify the expense of driving over here and standing at a crime scene. Deborah ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
916:The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it. ~ Dag Hammarskj ld, #NFDB
917:The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it. ~ Dag Hammarskjold, #NFDB
918: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, #NFDB
919:An upset is our maker’s way of telling us that we need to learn something. It is a tap on our shoulder saying, ‘Pay attention. You have something important to learn. If you lie, blame, justify, or deny the upset, you waste the upset and will waste a precious gem of wisdom.. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
920: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, #NFDB
921: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, #NFDB
922:And another question was unfortunately not asked of Göring: 'The German people put faith in you even if they doubted Hitler because you were gentlemanly and more likable. What did you, Göring, do to justify this confidence? You have led a luxurious life and collected stolen art. ~ Hermann Goring, #NFDB
923: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, #NFDB
924:In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger “me” that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
925:Young people have been educated and raised to believe that that aspect of our history disqualifies America from ever being anything that you can justify, from ever being anything great, from ever being anything with any goodness in it, that the United States is forever blemished. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
926: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, #NFDB
927: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, #NFDB
928: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, #NFDB
929:Do not think your story [for a one-person show] is unique. . . . your story is the same as millions of others. But that's o.k. - you just need to find the one or two things that makes your story interesting enough to justify someone leaving their apartment and exchanging currency. ~ Julie Halston, #NFDB
930: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, #NFDB
931:If the church looked at what he bought, they’d certainly wonder. He was doctoring animals for Miss Mary was the planned excuse. He tried to think like a woman in the toiletry aisle, trying to remember what they used that men didn’t. How the hell would he justify a pack of maxi-pads? ~ Lucian Bane, #NFDB
932: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, #NFDB
933:[She] had the indefinable charm of someone who said little but thought much. Miss Prim had always felt that such people were at a marked advantage. They never said anything tactless, never spouted nonsense, never had cause to regret their words or justify themselves. ~ Natalia Sanmart n Fenollera, #NFDB
934:Throughout the entire history of Christianity, problems have constantly arisen when believers equate the human acts of the church with the acts of God, when Christians assume that using the name of God to justify their actions in space and time is the same as God himself acting. But ~ Mark A Noll, #NFDB
935: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, #NFDB
936:My brain is in pain with none of the gain what’s happening in my mind I can’t quantify or justify my lifestyle eatin’ me alive like Bug on a chicken thigh, my sex drive in a nose dive off the high board, don’t need the awards I’m prerecorded, exploited, I need to be Sigmund Freuded Bobby ~ Joe Ide, #NFDB
937:Everyone knows drones are being deployed outside the US for assassinations. Let's say you even believe in drones. Shouldn't we have a system that would "justify" their use? i.e. we did this attack, because these bad guys were there, and here's what we did. We don't even have that. ~ Robert Greenwald, #NFDB
938:here was no great personal tragedy to shake my foundations, no injustice or betrayal to justify my falling away- just a few pesky questions that unraveled my faith like twine and left me standing here unable to sing a song I know by heart, chilled by a shadow no one else can see. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
939:I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to 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, #NFDB
940:Not long ago, someone who was dissatisfied with his or her spouse and wanted a divorce had to justify that decision. Today it’s the opposite: If you’re not fulfilled by your marriage, you have to justify staying in it, because of the tremendous cultural pressure to be good to one’s self. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
941: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, #NFDB
942:There was no great personal tragedy to shake my foundations, no injustice or betrayal to justify my falling away- just a few pesky questions that unraveled my faith like twine and left me standing here unable to sing a song I know by heart, chilled by a shadow no one else can see. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
943: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, #NFDB
944:Replaying in my mind the Martha Stewart, Leonidas Young, and Scooter Libby cases, I argued that if we weren’t going to hold retired generals and CIA directors accountable for blatantly lying during investigations, how could we justify jailing thousands of others for doing the same thing? ~ James Comey, #NFDB
945:This was true—I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions. ~ T a Obreht, #NFDB
946: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, #NFDB
947:Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace. ~ Ilyas Kassam, #NFDB
948:Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable-it is sympathy. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
949:Penny wanted this kind of attention from the world. She wanted people everywhere to know her name and to love her. There, she'd admitted it aloud. But she couldn't do anything that would justify such massive public acclaim. She just needed a mentor, a teacher, someone to discover her. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
950:We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
951:I reckon that her suffering is over, though I cannot justify the existence of the suffering in the first place. I reckon that there’s a logic to the brutality of the universe, but I can’t account for that, either. Nobody can. All I can do is buy Piper an ice-cream cone on the way home. ~ Jonathan Evison, #NFDB
952:Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable--it is sumpathy. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
953:People stand themselves next to the righteous They believe the things they say are true They speak in terms of what divides us To justify the violence they do But it is one, it is one One world spinning 'round the sun Wherever it is you call home Whatever country you come from It is one ~ Jackson Browne, #NFDB
954:Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
955: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, #NFDB
956:Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job. ~ Newt Gingrich, #NFDB
957:High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk. Florence ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
958: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, #NFDB
959: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, #NFDB
960:As Peyton got to his feet, he thought it was a sad commentary on your life when an interruption requiring you to justify an unjustifiable action was a step up from your other option—which happened to be a lively discussion about unrequited love with the object of your unreciprocated affections. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
961:Luther argued that freedom from sin through Christ’s grace encouraged and inspired Christians to perform good works out of immense gratitude and love for Christ: “The works themselves do not justify him [man] before God, but he does the works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God. ~ Michelle DeRusha, #NFDB
962:The proper mode of discussing any single theological topic is exegetical and rational. The first step to be taken is to deduce the doctrine itself from Scripture by careful exegesis; and the second step is to justify and defend this exegetical result upon grounds of reason. ~ William Greenough Thayer Shedd, #NFDB
963:Fanatics,’ Kandara replied automatically. ‘I’m no longer surprised by what they do, by the misery and suffering they inflict on others. Ideology is a sick soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause. ~ Peter F Hamilton, #NFDB
964:Fanatics,” Kandara replied automatically. “I’m no longer surprised by what they do, by the misery and suffering they inflict on others. Ideology is a sick-soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause. ~ Peter F Hamilton, #NFDB
965:If something happens that is highly unusual,
and no explanation is readily available,
isn’t “I don’t know” the only appropriate response?
How can we justify leaping to the extraordinary
conclusion that an unexplained event
is the work of a god?
Unknown means unknown. ~ Guy P Harrison,#NFDB
966: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, #NFDB
967:No matter what the issue is, don't try to justify why you don't feel good. And don't try to justify why you should feel differently. Don't try to blame whatever it is you think the reason is that's keeping you from feeling good. All of that is wasted effort. Just try to feel better right now. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
968:17From now on let no one trouble me [by making it necessary for me to justify my authority as an apostle, and the absolute truth of the gospel], for I bear on my body the dbranding-marks of Jesus [the wounds, scars, and other outward evidence of persecutions—these testify to His ownership of me]. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
969:In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity to understand what’s happening. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
970:Still, we have come far enough to recognize that we cannot justify our relative prayerlessness by saying that those who are peculiarly effective are more gifted than we. Wherever we stand in the spectrum of Christian maturation, we could do better than we do, and many of us could do much better. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
971: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, #NFDB
972:According to Jesus, whenever we do harm to another Christian, we are causing Him pain as well. That means that we, as followers of Christ, are not allowed to justify violence against other Christians by claiming that we’re simply following orders, fighting for justice, or standing up for liberty. ~ Keith Giles, #NFDB
973: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, #NFDB
974:I concluded that the Zionist “return” was, above all, an invention meant to arouse the sympathy of the West—particularly the Protestant Christian community, which preceded the Zionists in proposing the idea—in order to justify a new settlement enterprise, and that it had proven its effectiveness. ~ Shlomo Sand, #NFDB
975:In our day, this global offensive plays a well-defines role. Its aim is to justify te very unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
976: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, #NFDB
977:Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!) ~ Kate Christensen, #NFDB
978: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, #NFDB
979:If this incomplete ayaan hirsi wants fame sooo much then she shouldn't use religion as a base to be known. Some people justify their in justifications by selling their souls to the devil, ayaan I'm sure u have taken the time to read the bible. Do tell me it's stance on woman comparing to men... ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
980:We all fight wars—in our work, within our families and abroad in the wider world. 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, #NFDB
981: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, #NFDB
982: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, #NFDB
983: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, #NFDB
984:The recollection of almost overpowered Miss Tox. The subject of it had a peculiar interest for her directly. She asked him to shake hands, and congratulated his mother on his frank, ingenuous face. Rob, overhearing her, called up a look, to justify the eulogium, but it was hardly the right look. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
985:And on my conscience," he said, "I will for ever bear the weight of all those men who died in a hopeless cause. Two thousand against five thousand? How can 1 justify leading so few against so many?"
"You know how."
"So I can be king?"
"So that we are not slaves in our own land," I said. ~ Bernard Cornwell,#NFDB
986: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, #NFDB
987:Don't let western authors and evangelists fool you, Europeans were NOT killing witches; they were killing WOMEN. If the criminal act was allegedly that of sorcery/witchery, we would have seen similar accounts and charges against men to justify these narratives! They were indeed killing the WOMEN. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
988:If I ever hear that 'can't make an omelet' phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself! It's used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi, or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break! ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
989: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, #NFDB
990: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, #NFDB
991:The 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. ~ Shulamith Firestone, #NFDB
992:There are very good Christians who are compassionate and caring. And there are very bad Christians. You can say that about Islam, about Hinduism, about any faith. That is why I was saying that it was not the faith per se but the adherent. People will use their religion to justify virtually anything. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
993:Figuring out whether a deal was worth doing was nothing if not an exercise in calculating risk: did the size of the potential return justify the risk of all the things that could go wrong? That’s a question that every executive at every company has to be willing to tackle. A company that lacked the ~ Bethany McLean, #NFDB
994: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, #NFDB
995:God figured out when he separated us from the rest of the creatures that if we have the power to reason and justify and make decisions, then we are going to make a lot of mistakes passing through. Big, big, big mistakes. God understood that, then gave us the ultimate human power, the power of redemption. ~ Leon Uris, #NFDB
996:Over the years, I have written about the duality in Hillary that disturbs even many Democrats. She has the bright, idealistic public service side but it is offset by a dark ends-justify-the-means side. She’s confident and capable but she can also make decisions from a place of insecurity and paranoia. ~ Maureen Dowd, #NFDB
997: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, #NFDB
998: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, #NFDB
999:To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people. ~ Jason Brennan, #NFDB
1000:Fame Of Myself, To Justify
713
Fame of Myself, to justify,
All other Plaudit be
Superfluous—An Incense
Beyond Necessity—
Fame of Myself to lack—Although
My Name be else Supreme—
This were an Honor honorless—
A futile Diadem—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1001:if we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves, for we are seeking to escape punishment for our own sins by passing judgement on others, and are assuming by implication that the Word of God applies to ourselves in one way, and to others in another. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1002: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, #NFDB
1003: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, #NFDB
1004: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, #NFDB
1005: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, #NFDB
1006:The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1007: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, #NFDB
1008:Those who suffer by exposure to external costs do so involuntarily, while those who enjoy external benefits do so at no cost. Friedman thought that overcoming neighborhood effects “widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention” was one of the key roles of government. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
1009: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, #NFDB
1010: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, #NFDB
1011: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, #NFDB
1012: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,#NFDB
1013:We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliabillity, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1014:I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1015: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, #NFDB
1016:Multi-millionaires who pay half or less than half of the percentage of tax the rest of us pay justify their actions by saying they pay what the law requires. Though true, the fact is they found ways within the law to beat the purpose of the law - which, in the case of taxes, is that we all pay our fair share. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
1017:Couldn’t I try. . . . Naturally, it wouldn’t be a question of a tune . . . but couldn’t I, in another medium? . . . It would have to be a book: I don’t know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed—an existant can never justify the existence of another existant ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1018: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, #NFDB
1019: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, #NFDB
1020: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,#NFDB
1021:He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1022: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, #NFDB
1023: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, #NFDB
1024: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, #NFDB
1025:When I see a dead bird," Hans Dorfer said to me, "and I pick it up in my hand, tears come into my eyes. I can't make them not come. Nothing can justify the death of a bird. But if my father croaked all of a sudden, right here, right next to me, I swear I'd dance around the table and buy you a drink. I swear. ~ Philippe Claudel, #NFDB
1026:Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain. Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
1027:The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries..acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.
No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural... ~ Joseph Conrad,#NFDB
1028:Fear and judgment form a kind of negative feedback loop. Parents seem to have become more judgmental of parents’ not watching their children. To justify their moral outrage, they form a belief that an unsupervised child is at risk, and then the perception of increased risk intensifies their moral judgment yet again. ~ Kim Brooks, #NFDB
1029:One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
1030:Turing needed more staff, but his requests had been blocked by Commander Edward Travis, who had taken over as Director of Bletchley, and who felt that he could not justify recruiting more people. On October 21, 1941, the cryptanalysts took the insubordinate step of ignoring Travis and writing directly to Churchill. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
1031: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, #NFDB
1032: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, #NFDB
1033: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, #NFDB
1034: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, #NFDB
1035:He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1036:This is why men get a bad rap. Y’all do stupid shit then try to justify it by saying crap like, ‘For a man, it’s different.’ Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but if a man is kind, loving, respectful, makes a woman laugh, knows how to open the pickle jar, and change a flat tire, we really don’t need much else. ~ Aly Martinez, #NFDB
1037:Which is to say,” he continued, “that when I violate the sensibility I have about others and how I should be toward them, I immediately begin to see the world in ways that justify my self-betrayal. In those moments, I am beginning to see and live crookedly, which creates the need within me to be justified. ~ The Arbinger Institute, #NFDB
1038: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, #NFDB
1039:Every additional week, month, and year created greater pressure on them to justify why they had voluntarily continued to stay in such a bad situation, which led them to stay on and on—and to conjure up more and more reasons why they ought to keep suffering rather than to cut their losses and quit their lousy jobs. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
1040:Agents are probably going to hate me for saying it... You're not very valuable when you're making $20 million. When you're Mike Trout, making the minimum, you are crazy valuable. My first six years, before I was a free agent, I was very valuable. But there's nothing you can do that can justify a $20 million contract. ~ Mark Teixeira, #NFDB
1041:I don't think the war is going to end, but the war is just going to change. So we talk about change all the time, well that's what's going to change. You know, we tried having an idiot try and justify the war and give us these rationales and now we're going to have a very articulate and capable black man say it. ~ Immortal Technique, #NFDB
1042: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, #NFDB
1043:I’m trying to justify it somehow, he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one. Buildings are built by observing certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified. Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago? ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1044: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, #NFDB
1045: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, #NFDB
1046:He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1047:If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
1048: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, #NFDB
1049: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 destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification. ~ Farley Mowat, #NFDB
1050:corrected, with a few clear words, the thousand conjectures advanced by members of the club as to lost and unheard-of travellers, pointing out the true probabilities, and seeming as if gifted with a sort of second sight, so often did events justify his predictions. He must have travelled everywhere, at least in the spirit. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1051:In a global race, can we really justify the huge number of expensive peripheral European institutions? Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger? Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multibillion pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending and shutting down programmes that haven't worked? ~ David Cameron, #NFDB
1052:I think we've misinterpreted some of the scriptures to justify the death penalty. So whereas a lot of folks in America feel like we can do far better justice - it's more expensive to do the death penalty than the alternatives - there's so many reasons that people come to the conclusion to abolish the death penalty. ~ Shane Claiborne, #NFDB
1053:I want people to talk more. I mean, I watch Game of Thrones and there's all sorts of crazy nudity in it...and very little of which I can justify, except that it's in a titillating and somewhat exploitational manner, but I don't really feel like that's a subject that people are interested in because it's the same news story. ~ Craig Zobel, #NFDB
1054:My approach to 'Star Trek' was, 'I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.' That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands - now millions of dollars - to make an episode of the TV show. ~ David Gerrold, #NFDB
1055:All drunks have theories, endlessly tedious arguments, both vocal and silent, with which to justify their drinking. They drink to forget or remember, to see more clearly or discover blindness, they drink out of fear of success or failure, drink to find a home and love or drink to get away. Their lives revolve around drink. ~ James Crumley, #NFDB
1056:Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate. ~ Rinker Buck, #NFDB
1057:They call themselves the light.” “What about it?” “If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “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, #NFDB
1058:A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was. ~ Don Cupitt, #NFDB
1059:Even the most horrendous criminals in history, say one like Hitler, have their own philosophy to kill people. Man can justify all his actions. His cerebral capabilities are flexible. Try to rise above the events and you’ll see that, all of us are blind and helpless puppets in the hands of the puppeteer, called history. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar, #NFDB
1060:The catch-all phrase "the war on terrorism", in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against "criminal gangsterism". Terrorism is a tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic. It's deliberately vague and non-definable in order to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere and under any circumstance. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
1061:To church congregations and denominations that are weary of strife, of continually arguing things out in a tense, judgmental atmosphere, it may come as welcome news to learn that they, too, are allowed to say 'I know not' with regard to the Bible, free to not use it to justify taking sides in every issue that comes along. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
1062:It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life. ~ Aleksandar Hemon, #NFDB
1063:suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it:... the people of the thirty-three United States, who are eminently and essentially political, cannot discuss a political matter without quoting the old and New Testa- ments!"97 ~ Mark A Noll, #NFDB
1064:You think that this talk is tough? I tell you this: You have bastardized the Word of God in order to justify your fears and rationalize your insane treatment of each other. You will make God say whatever you need God to say in order to continue limiting each other, hurting each other, and killing each other in My name. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1065:Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility ... Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation because there was money in it. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1066:To which I’d like to append a variation on Lewis’s Law (“all comments on feminism justify feminism”): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women are not under attack and feminism has no basis in reality are apparently unaware that they’re handily proving the opposite. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1067:More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to justify or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there's anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1068:We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1069:Don’t believe me, don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anyone else. By not believing, whatever is untrue will disappear like smoke in this world of illusion. Everything is what it is. You don’t need to justify what is true; you don’t need to explain it. What is true doesn’t need anyone’s support. Your lies need your support. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
1070:He believed that “a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, … will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections.”31 ~ Louis Menand, #NFDB
1071:If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1072:Militant Islam, jihad, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, you name it, they are conquerors. It might be politically correct to say, somebody like Obama might try to justify what they're doing based on the Crusades, which he constantly does, but it has nothing to do with this. They are conquerors. Islam is a conquest ideology. Not even a religion. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1073:Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
1074:Throughout amerika's history, people have been imprisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal acts in order to justify that imprisonment.
Those who have dared to speak out against the injustices in this country, both Black and white, have paid dearly for their courage, sometimes with their lives. ~ Assata Shakur,#NFDB
1075:I created 'The Westerner' because of anger - anger at never-miss sheriffs, always-right marshalls, whitewashed gunfighters ... anger at TV's quick-draw tin gods who stand behind a tin star or ten cents' worth of righteous anger and justify their skill and slaughter with a self-conscious grin or a minute's worth of bad philosophy. ~ Sam Peckinpah, #NFDB
1076:There is no department of practical politics
where idealistic theories are strong enough to
cause great changes; when great changes occur, the
theories which justify them are always a
camouflage for passion. And the passion that has
given driving force to democratic theories is
undoubtedly the passion of envy. ~ Bertrand Russell,#NFDB
1077:When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1078:For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
1079:I assure you very explicitly, that in my opinion the conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness: and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard for the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
1080:[The designated or chosen leader tries to] articulate and justify the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1081:When virtuous mental attitudes, like mindfulness, respect, and compassion, are invoked to justify nonvirtuous acts like hunting, fishing, and eating animal products, the mental attitudes are insincere. They are self-deceptions that we create to justify habits that in our hearts we know are wrong, but to which we have become attached. ~ Norm Phelps, #NFDB
1082:You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents—that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent. That’s saying no to that situation.” So let’s accept what must be accepted, without letting our acceptance justify inaction. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
1083:Gay people wearing shawl-collar half-zip ecru sweaters does not oppress Christians. Christians turning their gay children out on to the streets, keeping gay spouses from sitting at each other’s deathbeds, and casting gay people as diseased predators so that it’s easier to justify beating and murdering them does oppress gay people. That ~ Lindy West, #NFDB
1084:Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, “was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
1085:The government tried to justify the secret NSA program by invoking exactly the kind of extreme theory of executive power that had motivated me to begin writing: the notion that the threat of terrorism vested the president with virtually unlimited authority to do anything to “keep the nation safe,” including the authority to break the law. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1086:I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1087:Sometimes I hear news about the huge dollars involved with CEO pay and corporate-management salaries, and I'm mystified at how someone can justify taking that much at the cost of other people's livelihoods. In a bizarre way, I'm almost kind of curious, like "How can they absolve themselves and enjoy their wealth?" I don't understand it. ~ Eddie Vedder, #NFDB
1088:Don't you see? We've become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, 'I'm angry at him and I didn't express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it's depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.' It's like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we're allowed to do stupid things. ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
1089:When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1090:Also, I am not shy about admitting that I am an incorrigible Peeping Tom. I have never passed an unshaded window without looking in, have never closed my ears to a conversation that was none of my business. I can justify or even dignify this by protesting that in my trade I must know about people, but I suspect that I am simply curious. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1091:Both as to high and low indifferently, men are prepossessed, charmed, fascinated by success; successful crimes are praised very much like virtue itself, and good fortune is not far from occupying the place of the whole cycle of virtues. It must be an atrocious act, a base and hateful deed, which success would not be able to justify. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
1092:Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
1093:Paris was one of the justifications the Obama administration used as part of the regulatory record to justify the cost and benefits of the Clean Power Plan.” That was an Obama-era 460-page rule to lower carbon dioxide emitted by power plants that the EPA estimated would save 4,500 lives a year. Pruitt was already moving to end the policy. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
1094:While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption. ~ Bob Hawke, #NFDB
1095:That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
1096:11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's. 12) There is no wrong way to feel. ~ Scott Hildreth, #NFDB
1097:Do not expect that once taking advantage of Russia's weakness, you will receive dividends forever. Russian has always come for their money. And when they come - do not rely on an agreement signed by you, you are supposed to justify. They are not worth the paper it is written. Therefore, with the Russian is to play fair, or do not play. ~ Otto von Bismarck, #NFDB
1098:How, then, was she—his wife, who’d taken a vow to remain with him in sickness and in health—supposed to justify ending the marriage and breaking up their family, after everything they had been through? She’d either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she’d once believed him to be. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1099:Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely-"the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the benefit of the many"- and keep it at a distance. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1100:The destruction of the world depends on the willingness of the people in it to harm each other in any way necessary to achieve their own ends and to further their own causes. And we got that part down pat, don’t we? We know how to hurt each other and how to think up whatever excuses we need to justify it. We’re victims and executioners both. ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
1101:Yes, the dish was flawless, and the wine pairing was supernatural, but these people were out of control. Were they trying to emotionally justify the meal’s price tag? Did they have too many cocktails in the drinks tent? It was a breathtaking meal, one of the best that Cindy had ever had, but the hysteria around her was making her brain red. ~ J Ryan Stradal, #NFDB
1102:And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
1103:Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority? ~ Louis Antoine de Saint Just, #NFDB
1104:This was inspired by my pediatrician, a relatively young man whom I called Dr. Handsome. I had assumed this was because his name was Dr. Hasen or Dr. Branson, but I recently found out his name was Dr. Ritger, so I guess I should have just died at age four when I decided to call my physician Dr. Handsome without so much as a pun to justify it. ~ Anna Kendrick, #NFDB
1105:Sustainability requires that we demand enduring quality. Steve Strong has a slide presentation pointing out that much of Oxford was built 800 years ago. What are we building today that will be here 800 years from now? If something like that emerged from this recession, it would help justify the hardship so many people are currently experiencing. ~ Denis Hayes, #NFDB
1106:The incorporeal newness that so intoxicated the earliest women online has morphed; it has become what the games critic Katherine Cross aptly calls a "Möbius strip of reality and unreality," in which Internet culture "becomes real when it is convenient and unreal when it is not; real enough to hurt people in, unreal enough to justify doing so. ~ Claire L Evans, #NFDB
1107:when you are earning money by doing what you don’t particularly like, there will be an urgent need to buy pleasure and happiness, from the acquired money to justify the pain and suffering you are going through in your work. The more is the suffering in earning the wealth, the greater is the desire of enjoying pleasure from the money so earned. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
1108:When you notice someone does something toxic the first time, don't wait for the second time before you address it or cut them off.
Many survivors are used to the "wait and see" tactic which only leaves them vulnerable to a second attack. As your boundaries get stronger, the wait time gets shorter. You never have justify your intuition. ~ Shahida Arabi,#NFDB
1109:How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
1110:I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1111:I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1112:This Man receiveth sinners”; not, however, that they may remain sinners, but He receives them that He may pardon their sins, justify their persons, cleanse their hearts by His purifying word, preserve their souls by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and enable them to serve Him, to show forth His praise, and to have communion with Him. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1113:Although the NYPD frequently attempts to justify stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color on the grounds that such tactics are necessary to get guns off the streets, less than 1 percent of stops (0.15 percent) resulted in guns being found, and guns were seized less often in stops of African Americans and Latinos than of whites. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1114:It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1115:I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1116:I never studied. I was too afraid. I thought that if an acting teacher had said to me, "You know what, you're not good," I would not have gone any further. It was easier for me to justify going to an audition and getting rejected, maybe because they wanted somebody blonde, maybe because I wasn't experienced enough. I could live with that more easily. ~ Demi Moore, #NFDB
1117:Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1118:Indeed, for the first time in memory, she felt… not comfortable, precisely—he affected her too much for her to relax into that emotion—but safe. She felt she might say anything she wished and not be ridiculed for her opinion, nor forced to justify her existence or usefulness. The sensation was a breath of clean air in the deepest of London fogs. ~ Kristen Callihan, #NFDB
1119:I am sorry they began their deliberations by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of their members. Nothing can justify this example but the innocence of their intentions and ignorance of the value of public discussions. I have no doubt that all their other measures will be good and wise. It is really an assembly of demigods. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1120:I feel history is more of a story than a lesson. I know this idea of presentism: this idea of constantly evoking the past to justify the present moment. A lot of people will tell you, "history is how we got here." And learning from the lessons of history. But that's imperfect. If you learn from history you can do things for all the wrong reasons. ~ Sarnath Banerjee, #NFDB
1121:When something like this [2003 invasion of Iraq] takes place, the international law professionals have a complicated task. There is a fringe that just tells the truth: Look, it's a violation of international law. But most have to construct complex arguments to justify it as defense counsel. That's basically their job, defense counsel for state power. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1122:Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
1123:so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1124:Yes, it sucked getting dumped. But wasn't it better to just be brutally honest? To admit that your feeling for someone is never going to be powerful enough to justify taking up any more of their time? I was doing him a favor, really. Freeing him up for a better opportunity. In fact, I was a practically a saint, if you really thought about it. Exactly. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
1125:And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
1126:Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1127:The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1128:The heavens I saw, they h ad never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister's death? Those stars, theyknew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I'd think. But they insisted on being beautiful too. ~ Affinity Konar, #NFDB
1129:It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going. ~ Shalom Auslander, #NFDB
1130:While it's certainly true that raising children is a big job and certainly has emotional resonance, it's really hard to intellectually justify the belief that you're adding something important to the world by adding more people to pollute the planet and compete for opportunities that become more precious as the number of people vying for a chance grows. ~ Amanda Marcotte, #NFDB
1131:Christianity is one of the few worldviews that can justify absolute human rights because it affirms that those rights are given to us by God. As our founders recognized, governments aren’t meant to give or take away rights: governments are meant to secure rights that the people already possess. That’s what we affirmed in our Declaration of Independence. ~ Norman L Geisler, #NFDB
1132:Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice.” ~ Durzo Blint ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
1133:We are having inexplicable conversations about birth control, conversations where women must justify why they are taking birth control, conversations where a congressional hearing on birth control includes no women because the men in power are well aware that women don’t need to be included in the conversation. We don’t have inalienable rights the way men do. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1134:while personal income in the U.S. more than doubled between i 96o and the 19gos in constant dollars, the proportion of people saying they are very happy remained a steady 30 percent. One conclusion that the findings seem to justify is that beyond the threshold of poverty, additional resources do not appreciably improve the chances of being happy. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1135:America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1136:Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
1137:The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing. ~ Michael Polanyi, #NFDB
1138:there may be good reasons to continue investing in something to finalise it. But beware of doing so for the wrong reasons, such as to justify non-recoverable investments. Rational decision-making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
1139:There may be good reasons to continue investing in something to finalize it. But beware of doing so for the wrong reasons, such as to justify non-recoverable investments. Rational decision-making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
1140:I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don`t have to justify myself to anyone about this. I don`t care what anyone thinks or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject. ~ Dario Argento, #NFDB
1141:I think what we need is better understanding of how to do risk analysis of a CDO, but that they still can perform a very valuable function because they can aggregate these risks and pass them around so that mortgages or other kinds of loans can be packaged and sold to investors all over the world, who in most times, would justify a small amount of each one. ~ Robert F Engle, #NFDB
1142:I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as they would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not, like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
1143:If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion? 3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1144:Mr. Milton set out in his great poem to justify the ways of God to men, as he says. He has not considered one question, however: perhaps God has forbidden men to know His ways, for if they did know the full extent of His goodness, and the magnitude of our rejection of it, they would be so disheartened they would abandon all hope of redemption, and die of grief. I ~ Iain Pears, #NFDB
1145:Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings? ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1146:The man of science, whether he knows it or not (most often, obviously, he does know it), whether he wishes it or not (ordinarily he does not wish it), cannot help but be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. He is distinguished from the philosopher only by the fact that the philosopher must, in addition, explain and justify the realism practiced by science ~ Lev Shestov, #NFDB
1147:And this, I thought, was why Sam and Cole could not get along. Because when it came down to it, Cole made bad decisions for good reasons, and Sam couldn’t justify that. Now, Cole dangled this tempting thing in front of Sam, this thing he wanted more than anything, along with the thing that he wanted the least. I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted him to give. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1148:Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimize a conservative status quo. Fundamentalist thinkers use religion to justify supporting imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia. They deny the message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1149:I guess I'm more interested in why people feel they have to believe in God. Why can't it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we're born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
1150:But, of course, we cannot choose. We can only try to cope. That is what one does with sorrow, with tragedy, with any misfortune. We do not try to explain it. We do not try to explain it. We do not justify it by telling ourselves that we somehow deserve it. We do not even accept it. We survive it. We recognize its unfairness and defiantly choose to go on living. ~ Harold S Kushner, #NFDB
1151:Envy shrugged. 'Can no value be found in good intentions?'
'What, precisely, are you trying to justify? And to me, or yourself?'
She glared, then quickened her pace. 'You're no fun at all,' she sniffed as she pulled
ahead, 'and presumptuous as well. I'm going to talk with Tool, his moods don't
swing!'
No, they just hang there, twisting in the wind. ~ Steven Erikson,#NFDB
1152:In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners ~ Starhawk, #NFDB
1153:Watch us, all stand in line, for a slice of the devil's pie. Who am I to justify, all the evil in our eye. Been through hell. All them fools whose souls' for sale. Demons screaming in my ear. Your soul's me, your soul's somethin' that I, feel inside. If I run, Lord only knows how far. You're part of my identity. I sometimes have the tendency to look at you religiously. ~ D Angelo, #NFDB
1154:Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1155:If you do not understand the Golden Rule, which is the most important law in the universe, then you are in trouble. All other rules in your holy books combined — are not as valuable as the ONE Golden Rule. Take two minutes to learn the most crucial law in life. Killing another human comes with the highest penalty, regardless of how you justify it. All life is sacred. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1156:The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They’re categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be. ~ Jess Row, #NFDB
1157:Evidence and logic are tools we use to justify and flesh out our beliefs, but we are deceiving ourselves to think that they are the source of our beliefs. I will return to this idea, because it is crucial to understanding the process of belief change as well; and clearly, for our world to have a chance of surviving, a lot of beliefs are going to have to change. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1158:I've said repeatedly that where we see terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIL, they have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse, for basically barbarism and death. These are people who kill children, kill Muslims, take sex slaves - there's no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1159:We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams? ~ John Zerzan, #NFDB
1160:Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1161:Buy it.” This is my sister Amy’s advice in regard to everything, from a taxidermied horse head to a camouflage thong. “Just get it,” she says. “You’ll feel better.” Eye something closely or pick it up for further inspection, and she’ll move in to justify the cost. “It’s not really that expensive, and, besides, won’t you be getting a tax refund? Go on. Treat yourself. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1162:Renunciation
Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue -The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation -Not now -The putting out of Eyes -Just Sunrise -Lest Day -Day's Great Progenitor -Outvie
Renunciation -- is the Choosing
Against itself -Itself to justify
Unto itself -When larger function -Make that appear -Smaller -- that Covered Vision -- Here -~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1163:they could not prove bin Laden’s personal responsibility for the attack—at least, the evidence would not meet the standards of a criminal indictment. Nor could they provide specific proof of bin Laden’s role that Clinton could cite if he wished to publicly justify retaliation. Yet the CIA’s officers told colleagues that they were dead certain of bin Laden’s involvement. ~ Steve Coll, #NFDB
1164:Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice.” ~ Brent Weeks Durzo Blint ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
1165:The black cop cuts a look at his white partner, showing off. “I asked you a question,” he says, digging his finger into Jay’s sternum. Jay is slow to answer the cop, resenting the need to justify himself to a kid who wouldn’t even have a job on the police force if it weren’t for the civil rights Jay’s generation marched and died for. “You want to take your hand off me? ~ Attica Locke, #NFDB
1166:A great many young men try to justify themselves and check inward protests by the perpetual self-suggestion that it is better to keep on, for the present, in questionable occupations, because the great financial reward will put them in position to do better later. This is a sort of sedative to the conscience to keep it quiet until they can afford to listen to it. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1167:Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say "no". If we cannot say "no" then our "yes" has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment. ~ Peter Block, #NFDB
1168:I was obsessed with the scientific instruments people were building and all the weird experiments they were doing. I did actually wind up working in some of that, but there were whole sections I'd written about these instruments that ultimately had to be abandoned when I realized that the book really was about Margaret Cavendish. I couldn't justify using all of them. ~ Danielle Dutton, #NFDB
1169:This is what fundamentalist love to do. They persuade themselves that they have “God’s absolute point of view” and that their mission is to bring everyone else into line “with their God.” In so doing, they become the Catholic Taliban and justify their “moral terrorism” as somehow required by God himself. This is why, as shown above, Pope Francis calls them “godless. ~ Aaron Milavec, #NFDB
1170:We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however “humanely” we treat them. ~ Gary L Francione, #NFDB
1171:I envy you, that it’s so easy for you to think of things in terms of black and white. I’d like to think I’m a good person, believe it or not. Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was right at the time. In hindsight, some of the ends didn’t justify the means, and sometimes there were unforseen consequences.” Like Dinah. “But I don’t think of myself as a bad person. ~ Wildbow, #NFDB
1172:If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1173:Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1174:Nothing could better justify the colonizer's privileged position than industry, and nothing could better justify tge colonised 's destitution than his laziness. The mythical potrait of the colonized therefore includes an unbelievable laziness, and that of the colonizer suggests that employing the colonized is not very profitable, thereby authorizing his reasonable wages. ~ Albert Memmi, #NFDB
1175:There are two disadvantages to this political fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 1945. That in itself is economically disruptive. In addition, they can be economically inefficient even in peacetime, too small to justify all the paraphernalia of statehood ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1176:However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
1177:So in the sense in which the apostle James seems to use the word justify for manifestative justification, a man is justified not only by faith, but also by works; as a tree is manifested to be good, not only by immediately examining the tree, but also by the fruit,664 Prov. xx. 11. “Even a child is known by his doing, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
1178:Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimize a conservative status quo. Fundamentalist thinkers use religion to justify supporting imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia. They deny the unifying message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1179:When, in the fifteenth century, some audacious mariners who had sailed from Europe discovered America, nothing seemed to justify such a venture in the eyes of their contemporaries. Today, however, we can see it has given birth to the twentieth-century United States. Don't you think the existence of the United States constitutes a valid reason for Columbus's wild scheme... ~ Pierre Boulle, #NFDB
1180:Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life. If you allowed your dark and unspoken desires for your partner, for example, to manifest themselves—if you were even willing to consider them—you might discover that they were not so dark, given the light of day. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1181: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. ~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773), British statesman, man of letters. Letter to his son, 15th January 1753. The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (1774–5), #NFDB
1182:Somehow, when his duties had consisted of killing hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, Zane had been able to justify the situation. Those groups were warring against the wagon trains and refusing to follow government instructions. Many tribes saw the whites as an impossible threat, refusing to even try to get along. But the Blackfoot had been friendly. For the most part. Mountain ~ Tracie Peterson, #NFDB
1183:A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have to answer the question "How does it feel to be a woman playing music?" or "Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?" The people who get there early have to work the hardest. ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
1184:How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and clearness is there, maybe the result of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1185:Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life. If you allowed your dark and unspoken desires for your partner, for example, to manifest themselves—if you were even willing to consider them—you might discover that they were not so dark, given the light of day. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1186:I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?) ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
1187:moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1188:Of the Four Tendencies, Obligers struggle most often against the temptations of loopholes. Rebels don’t make excuses to justify doing what they want; Upholders and Questioners feel a greater pressure from their own inner expectations to resist loopholes. Obligers act when they’re held externally accountable, so they look for loopholes to excuse them from that accountability. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
1189:The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1190:They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man. ~ John Ralston Saul,#NFDB
1191:there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. N my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1192:When our freedom to have something is limited, the item becomes less available, and we experience an increased desire for it. However, we rarely recognize that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we want it. Still, we need to make sense of our desire for the item, so we begin to assign it positive qualities to justify the desire. ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
1193:in the same way that confessing Christians are constantly challenged by pluralists to justify the authority of their position in a world characterized by so much demonstrable empirical pluralism, so pluralists themselves must be challenged to justify the authority of their position. They are claiming things about God, truth, the nature of reality. The question is, How do they know? ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
1194:This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself. If these structures can’t meet that challenge, they should be dismantled—and, anarchists believe, “refashioned from below,” as commentator Nathan Schneider observes. In ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1195:Because I know that the early Greeks and Romans and the early Europeans at that age did not see racism as we see it now - because racism was created to justify slavery to build the capital for capitalism - and back in the day they respected talent over race. We had an African Pope in the late 5th century, we had an African Emperor of Rome, and early church Fathers were black. ~ Immortal Technique, #NFDB
1196:Lincoln embraced the Declaration of Independence before and during the Civil War to justify both prosecuting the war and abolishing slavery, Wilson denounced the same principles and language in the Declaration as nonsense or dismissed them as relevant only to the American Revolution, insisting that to treat them as the Founders intended served as an impediment to communal progress. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
1197:Never fails. Scratch a guy who always talks about what a winner he is or how he’s “self-made” or how he’s pulled himself up by the bootstraps, and underneath you’ll always find a little boy who had everything handed to him. It was like they needed a blind spot to justify their tremendous luck. Something like: I can’t have all of this because of fate or chance—I must be special. “I’m ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1198:Every choice closes doors ,” I said, “and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they’re surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don’t invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me. ~ Michael Nava, #NFDB
1199:The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment damned up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breath-taking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages a world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1200:Unless you impose limits, people will always justify spending more time and more money by saying, “We’re just trying to make a better movie.” This occurs not because people are greedy or wasteful but because they care about their particular part of the film and don’t necessarily have a clear view of how it fits into the whole. They believe that investing more is the only way to succeed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1201:We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been. ~ Octavia E Butler, #NFDB
1202:From Christ on down to Edison, the men who have achieved most have been those who met with the most stubborn forms of temporary defeat. This would seem to justify the conclusion that Infinite Intelligence has a plan, or a law, by which it hurdles men over many obstacles before giving them the privilege of leadership or the opportunity to render useful service in a noteworthy fashion. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1203:My lie has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. 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, #NFDB
1204:it’s stupid to think that listening to God means your life will be easy.” I stared at him, daring him to justify his comment. “Jesus listened to God all the time, and his life sucked. People called him names, his friends betrayed him, and he was murdered.” He gave me a meaningful look, and then turned back to the road. “He was God’s only Son. If anyone knew what God wanted, it was Him. ~ Natasha Deen, #NFDB
1205:My lie has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. 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, #NFDB
1206:The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1207:You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents—that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent. That’s saying no to that situation.” So let’s accept what must be accepted, without letting our acceptance justify inaction. Don’t wait for the world to change. Kill the serpent. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
1208:Although we know nothing of what an atom is, yet we cannot resist forming some idea of a small particle, which represents it to the mind ... there is an immensity of facts which justify us in believing that the atoms of matter are in some way endowed or associated with electrical powers, to which they owe their most striking qualities, and amongst them their mutual chemical affinity. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
1209:The truth is always revealed through the Word; but sadly, people don’t always accept it. It is a painful process to face our faults and deal with them. Generally speaking, people justify misbehavior. They allow their past and how they were raised to negatively affect the rest of their lives. Our past may explain why we’re suffering, but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
1210:It was at ‘The Little Lodge’ I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as ‘the Governess’ was announced … Mrs Everest produced a book called Reading without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case … [When] the Governess was due to arrive, I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I ~ Norman Davies, #NFDB
1211:Mankind invents cultures—and cultures invent myths to justify and explain their existence. Prominent among these are the myths and ceremonies of the rites of passage for boys. The passage from boyhood to manhood. This is the time when the boy is separated from his mother and the other women. In some primitive cultures the boys go and live with the men—and never see their mothers again. ~ Harry Harrison, #NFDB
1212:Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
1213:She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute. ~ Max Barry, #NFDB
1214:I do not exclude this, but I would like to draw your attention to one absolutely key aspect: In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council can sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state is inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1215:If we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God and that He came into this world and went to the cross of Calvary and died for our sins and rose again in order to justify us and to give us life anew and prepare us for heaven-if you really believe that, there is only one inevitable deduction, namely that He is entitled to the whole of our lives, without any limit whatsoever. ~ Martyn, #NFDB
1216:It is very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
1217:Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. ROMANS 3:27–30 ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1218:To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of 'commonsense' ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify. ~ Patricia Hill Collins, #NFDB
1219: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. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1220:Anybody in public life is well aware of how important the judgments of the press are. I'm firmly convinced that if the good Lord had made the world today, he would have spent six days creating the heavens and earth and all the living creatures upon it. But on the seventh day, he would not have rested. He would have had to justify it to Helen Thomas. (Gerald Ford as quoted by Helen Thomas.) ~ Helen Thomas, #NFDB
1221:For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet. ~ Kate Raworth, #NFDB
1222:I really don't know. I guess I'm more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can't it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we're born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
1223:I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defenses. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it's difficult with old friends; difficult because it's so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged. 'Nothing's perfect. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
1224:I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ~ Saki, #NFDB
1225:People say, oh we just need charismatic leaders to continue on to Mars. Now we've gone to the moon, of course Mars is next. No. Mars was never, of course, next. It is next if you think we went to the moon because we're explorers, but if you know we went to the moon because we were at war then we're never going to Mars. There's no military reason to do it, to justify the expenditure. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1226:The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1227:This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did—or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else—is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are “key determinants of how we age.” They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present. ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
1228:I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ~ Saki, #NFDB
1229:There is no such thing as undesirable work,” he continued. “There are only people who see certain kinds of work as undesirable. People who use every excuse in the world to justify why they have to do work they hate to do. People who look upon their work as a punishment for who they are and where they stand in the world, rather than as an opportunity to see themselves as they really are. ~ Michael E Gerber, #NFDB
1230:Truth has advocates who seek understanding," Richard said. "Corrupt ideas have miserable little fanatics who attempt to enforce their beliefs through intimidation and brutality... through faith. Savage force is faith's obedient servant. Violence on an apocalyptic scale can only be born of faith because reason, by its very nature, disarms senseless cruelty. Only faith thinks to justify it. ~ Terry Goodkind, #NFDB
1231:Why, sometimes I didn’t know. Was it because I’d sacrificed so much for him that the idea of losing him felt like losing everything? Was I so fearful for the boys’ future with divorced parents? Had I started to believe the awful things Albert said to me? The more passive I acted about the move, the more hateful he became, as if he wanted a fight so he could internally justify abandonment. ~ Marie Benedict, #NFDB
1232:If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1233:We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep inthe memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood. ~ Selma Fraiberg, #NFDB
1234:I never met David Kelly, but I knew from what he told other people that this was not his view. The BBC were saying that Tony Blair was making up lies so that he could send young men and women to war, maybe to die. I think that if the BBC had done their jobs professionally, they'd have realised that you couldn't justify what they said. And nothing has emerged since to justify that report. ~ Alastair Campbell, #NFDB
1235:It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1236:Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn’t that at all. She was like Ivy’s grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1237:Mistakes and slips are a necessary evil part of our daily living. We learn through them all the time. Life is too broad for us to do everything so perfectly, but we must not justify our mistakes and slips when we know that we are far better than our mistakes! The best regret is to take a robust action in the right direction to prove how far better we are than our mistakes and slips. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
1238:Wars Always Lie; No war has the honesty to confess; I kill so that I can steal. Wars always invoke noble motives: they kill in the name of peace, in the name of civilization, the name of progress, of democracy. And, if so many lies weren’t enough, the media is always ready to invent imaginary enemies to justify converting the world into a grand lunatic asylum and an immense slaughterhouse. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
1239:Remember," cried Willoughby, "from whom you received the account. Could it be an impartial one? I acknowledge that her situation and character ought to have been respected by me. I do not mean to justify myself, but at the same time cannot leave you to suppose that I have nothing to urge--that because she was injured, she was irreproachable, and because I was a libertine, she must be a saint... ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1240:Classing Jefferson with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were also reluctant to speak at length in public, Adams said, “A public speaker who inserts himself, or is urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes himself enemies.”27 ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
1241:We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1242:you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to praise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you" for the mustard. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1243:it is terribly important to a militaristic society to have constant wars going on that are both unwinnable and completely futile, in order to justify a constant running fire-hose blast of deficit spending. For example, I personally vow that the United States will be running full-scale wars against both Drugs and Terror until both Drugs and Terror are completely obliterated from the earth. These ~ Cintra Wilson, #NFDB
1244:Nakamoto’s invention has given birth to a new kind of platform—one with open architecture and a governance model but no central authority. Having no need for gatekeepers, it will put serious pressure on existing platforms that rely on costly gatekeepers. Financial services that claim 2–4 percent of transactions simply for passing them may in the future be hard pressed to justify their rake. ~ Geoffrey G Parker, #NFDB
1245:Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1246:You will find that the Bible, if you want it to, will justify many things. St. Paul had a very male chauvinistic view of women. He would say things like women must not talk in church, must cover their heads, they mustn't talk and must remember that it was a woman who first tempted and this whole mess started because women messed us up. So you can read it in such a way that it justifies polygamy. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
1247:A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter…No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities. ~ George Steiner, #NFDB
1248:asked how the Barbary states could justify “[making] war upon nations who had done them no injury.” The response was nothing less than chilling. According to his holy book, the Qur’an, Abdrahaman explained, “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Christian sailors were, plain and simple, fair game. ~ Brian Kilmeade, #NFDB
1249:It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife. ~ David G McAfee, #NFDB
1250:that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1251:There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
1252:When the people who are in power want to use again, create an image, to justify something that's bad, they use the press. And they'll use the press to create a humanitarian image, for a devil, or a devil image for a humanitarian. They'll take a person who's a victim of the crime, and make it appear he's the criminal, and they'll take the criminal and make it appear that he's the victim of the crime. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
1253:Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not. ~ A E Housman, #NFDB
1254:Christopher fell back a step, his breath catching. His body responded to her touch with disconcerting swiftness. A lady never put her hand to any area of a man’s torso unless the circumstances were so extreme that…well, he couldn’t even imagine what would justify it. Perhaps if his waistcoat was on fire, and she was trying to put it out. Other than that, he couldn’t think of any defensible reason. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
1255:exceptionalist, said Alastair. So? said the American. Exceptionalism is only a problem when it’s used to justify bad policies. Ignorance is a problem. Complacency is a problem. But to aspire to exceptional behavior—exceptionally generous, judicious, humane behavior—as anyone lucky enough to have been born in an exceptionally rich, exceptionally educated, exceptionally democratic country should do ~ Lisa Halliday, #NFDB
1256:Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
1257:I strongly oppose cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience. And while we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
1258:That's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1259:That's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1260:The numbers were, at best, guesstimates, and all three men knew it. The relevant figure would ultimately be the one that represented the most they could possibly ask from Congress without raising too many questions. Whatever that sum turned out to be, they knew they could count on (Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) Kashkari to perform some sort of mathematical voodoo to justify it: ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin, #NFDB
1261:Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. ~ Melvyn Bragg, #NFDB
1262:With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it. ~ Cate Blanchett, #NFDB
1263:But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1264:But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
1265:But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
1266:If we are to put the era of nuclear terror behind us, we must struggle against the real 'enemy.' That enemy is not nuclear weapons per se, nor is it the states that possess or develop them. The real enemy that we must confront is the ways of thinking that justify nuclear weapons; the readiness to annihilate others when they are seen as a threat or as a hindrance to the realization of our objectives. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
1267:Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1268:Problem is, a lot of Christians who believe the world is headed for imminent destruction don’t use their eschatology to motivate altruism. Some, in fact, use their belief in the coming apocalypse to justify negligence and destruction. Critics of pretrib theology point out that rapture obsession can make Christians overlook glaring social needs in the present, like genocide, disease, and abject poverty. ~ Kevin Roose, #NFDB
1269:The first duty of an officer—whether a lieutenant or a captain or the Commander in Chief—is to the enlisted men. That was a basic principle of command. He could not justify not calling up the best qualified officers simply because they had already done their duty. They were needed again. They could save some lives. It was a dirty goddamned trick on them, but that’s the way it was going to have to be. ~ W E B Griffin, #NFDB
1270:We often assume things about others to justify our resistance. We make statements such as: It wouldn’t do any good anyway. My husband/wife won’t understand. I would have to change my whole personality. Only crazy people go to therapists. They couldn’t help me with my problem. They couldn’t handle my anger. My case is different. I don’t want to bother them. It will work itself out. Nobody else does it. ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
1271:You don’t have to. It has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t hurt you or anyone. It’s people choosing to live and play together. If you can’t handle that, the door is that way, but if you think I’m going to stand here and debate with you whether Sean and my brother are abusive husbands because they and their wives indulge in spanking and bondage, you’re wrong. I won’t justify myself or my family to you. ~ Lexi Blake, #NFDB
1272:Cutting off the nose is a metaphor for shame. The notion of locating honor in the women of the household has led to women in India being objectified and denied their freedom and choices. Whether Sita is physically abused or not, Ram's honor has been stained. Modern notions of justice mock these deep-rooted traditional notions of shame that have been used to justify the violent oppression of women. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
1273:Dr. King’s flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made. ~ William F Buckley Jr, #NFDB
1274:If we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God and that He came into this world and went to the cross of Calvary and died for our sins and rose again in order to justify us and to give us life anew and prepare us for heaven-if you really believe that, there is only one inevitable deduction, namely that He is entitled to the whole of our lives, without any limit whatsoever. ~ D Martyn Lloyd Jones, #NFDB
1275:I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ~ Hector Hugh Munro, #NFDB
1276:It is true, the Zen-man’s contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1277:We Must Love Someone We Must Love Someone If we are to justify Our presence on this earth. We must keep loving all our days, Someone, anyone, anywhere Outside our selves; For even the sarus crane Will grieve over its lost companion, And the seal its mate. Somewhere in life There must be someone To take your hand And share the torrid day. Without the touch of love There is no life, and we must fade away. ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
1278:[W]e think the very term 'value investing' is redundant. What is 'investing' if it is not the act of seeking value at least sufficient to justify the amount paid? Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value -- in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price -- should be labeled speculation (which is neither illegal, immoral nor -- in our view -- financially fattening). ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1279:Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1280:The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … 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, #NFDB
1281:Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1282:Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1283:In the chapter on study we considered the importance of observing ourselves to see how often our speech is a frantic attempt to explain and justify our actions. Having seen this in ourselves, let's experiment with doing deeds without any words of explanation whatever. We note our sense of fear that people will misunderstand why we have done what we have done. We seek to allow God to be our justifier. ~ Richard J Foster, #NFDB
1284:Peyton flashed his palms…then deliberately linked them behind his back and spoke in the Old Language. “I hereby offer you a rythe. I do so in recognition of my disrespect and disregard of your status as a bonded male unto the female Paradise, with whom you have been mated. It is not my intention to justify this behavior in any fashion, and I wish to make up for my lapse in judgment according to the Old Ways. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1285:Whenever there was a dilemma, I just left it in abeyance and—without really consciously dealing with it intensively—let it grow toward the clarity of a decision. But this clarity is not so much intellectual as it is instinctive. The decision is made; whether one can adequately justify it retrospectively is another question. “Thus” it happened that I went.
Bonhoeffer was always thinking about thinking. ~ Eric Metaxas,#NFDB
1286:I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick," I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living. ~ Rose Wilder Lane, #NFDB
1287:Marriage to Perry meant she was always ready to justify her actions, constantly monitoring what she’d just said or done, while simultaneously feeling defensive about the defensiveness, her thoughts and feelings twisting into impenetrable knots, so that sometimes, like right now, sitting in a room with normal people, all the things she couldn’t say rose in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
1288:No. You can't work your way into heaven. Anytime you try and justify yourself with works, you disqualify yourself with works. What I do here, every day, for the rest of my life, is only my way of saying, 'Lord, regardless of what eternity holds for me, let me give something back to you. I know it doesn't even no scorecard. But let me make something of my life before I go.. and then, Lord, I'm at your mercy. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
1289:It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words ‘God is dead’, whose ethic was the will to power. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
1290:Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention. ~ Jean Marzollo, #NFDB
1291:No group can survive, let alone thrive, unless what is good for the overall community is more important than individual freedom. Take, for example, resource allocation. How can anyone with any intelligence possibly justify, in terms of the overall community, the accumulation and hoarding of enormous material assets by a few individuals when others do not even have food, clothing, and other essentials?” In ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1292:The issue is your undermining of the authority of rational argument. What it liberates people to do is to act on their deepest prejudices, without having to justify them rationally. Don’t assume that what they do then will be politically acceptable to you. If they feel liberated to choose injustice and cruelty, you may not like the results. You may be the first to be lined up against the wall and shot. ~ Timothy Williamson, #NFDB
1293:The idea of strategy, like the owl of Minerva, typically arises just as the sun is setting on an organization. An old saw has it that strategy is when you’re running out of ammo but you keep firing on all guns so that the enemy won’t know. As a rule, corporations turn to strategy when they can’t justify their existence in any other way, and they start planning when they don’t really know where they are going.”18 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1294:The same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. One gets married because the spouse seems worthy of sharing one’s life with, but unless one then behaves as if this is true, the partnership will appear to lose value with time. All ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1295:God tests His servants with obedience. He deliberately places us in situations where the standards of religion and society would appear to justify our actions. He allows others, especially those close to us, to encourage us to protect ourselves. We may even think we would be noble and protect others by avenging ourselves. But this is not God’s way. It is the way of the world’s wisdom. It is earthly and fleshly. ~ John Bevere, #NFDB
1296:Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad'st it pregnant: What is in me dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the heighth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
1297:Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
1298:There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do. ~ Paul Krugman, #NFDB
1299:You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1300:For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
1301:Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes . . . and” rather than “No . . . but.” “The idiot is bound by his pride,” he says. “It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him—criticism, ideas—and he works with them. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1302:they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists. ~ Nick Cohen, #NFDB
1303:What is good is only a matter of opinion in secular society. Using society’s own standard of goodness, careful observation of the bigger picture may reveal that a particular good has been outweighed by general evil. When a society defines its own morality and then applies it to itself, that society can justify its own serious breaches of character. It is able to lower the standard to the detriment of all. ~ William Wilberforce, #NFDB
1304:You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1305:What do you want? You can't want to be happy, because that's too easy and too boring. You can't want only to love, because that's impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1306:What do you want? You can’t want to be happy, because that’s too easy and too boring. You can’t want only to love, because that’s impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1307:Women of a selected class, by the use of slaves and servants have become inactive, the mere recipients of values, no longer creators but "feeding on unearned wealth." This hurts their nature and debases the social fabric. If a woman does no labor in her home which could properly make her self-supporting outside that home she is in duty bound to do something outside her home to justify her claim to support. ~ Anna Garlin Spencer, #NFDB
1308:Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. ~ George Monbiot, #NFDB
1309:excuses are nothing more than a way to deceive ourselves and justify doing nothing. You will come alive like never before if you will aggressively reach out to others. Let us not forget the words of Jesus: “I give you a new commandment: that you should love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you too should love one another” (John 13:34). Without a doubt, this is our purpose and the will of God for our lives. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
1310:He had the marketing department organize tests, running commercials in only the Minneapolis and Portland media markets and measuring whether they generated an uptick in local purchases. They did—but, Bezos concluded, not enough to justify the investment.12 “It was pretty clear afterward that TV advertising wasn’t really having an impact,” says Mark Stabingas, a finance vice president who joined the company from Pepsi. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
1311:THE REMINDER I While I watch the Christmas blaze
Paint the room with ruddy rays,
Something makes my vision glide
To the frosty scene outside. There, to reach a rotting berry,
Toils a thrush, — constrained to very
Dregs of food by sharp distress,
Taking such with thankfulness. Why, O starving bird, when I
One day’s joy would justify,
And put misery out of view,
Do you make me notice you! ~ Charles Dickens,#NFDB
1312:The wisdom of the most sagacious ancient Greeks, the wisdom of the most perceptive rabbis of ancient Canaan, and all the parables of Christ teach us to believe not in justice, but in truth. In a world of rampant lying, where so many lies are used to inflame passions and justify false grievances, the indiscriminate pursuit of justice leads sooner or later to insanity, mass murder, and the ruin of entire civilizations. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1313:We take these animals and completely violate who they are. We use them, abuse them, and deprive them all their lives…then we cut their throats, shred them and eat them! Morally, I’m against it, ethically, I can’t justify it, and ecologically, it’s just insane. The thought of meat-eating makes me shudder. As far as wearing fur is concerned, it is the rudest, most inconsiderate, selfish and sick façade I can imagine. ~ River Phoenix, #NFDB
1314:The sovereign God himself has come down into this world and has experienced its darkness. He has personally drunk the cup of its suffering down to the dregs. And he did it not to justify himself but to justify us, that is, to bear the suffering, death, and curse for sin that we have earned. He takes the punishment upon himself so that someday he can return and end all evil without having to condemn and punish us. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1315:I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money. I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue. ~ Wright Patman, #NFDB
1316:I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
1317:Let us consider, brethren, we are struggling for our best birthrights and inheritance, which being infringed, renders all our blessings precarious in their enjoyments, and, consequently triffling in their value. Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves on the ruin of this Country. Let us convince every invader of our freedom, that we will be as free as the constitution our fathers recognized, will justify. ~ Samuel Adams, #NFDB
1318:was Himmler whom the Führer had entrusted with the Final Solution, their breathtaking plan to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It was Himmler who had the nerve to justify this plan, standing before his SS generals in October 1943 and assuring them that they had “the moral right to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us,” to pile up their “corpses side by side” in monuments to the Reich’s power. ~ David Talbot, #NFDB
1319:It is in our nature that if someone points out our fault, we immediately resist and justify ourselves and try to prove the other person wrong by advancing logic and reasons that support our beliefs. If we don't have reasons to support our faith, we avoid any discussion and even ignore the person, but we try to always hold on to our beliefs. The only way we can change our belief is when we ourselves realise our mistakes. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
1320:Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
1321:suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. ~ Valeria Luiselli, #NFDB
1322:It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1323:Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making. ~ George Will, #NFDB
1324:Ibsen, Strindberg, and Nietzsche were angry men—not primarily angry about this or that, but just angry. And so they each found an outlook on life that justified anger. The young admired their passion, and found in it an outlet for their own feelings of revolt against parental authority. The assertion of freedom seemed sufficiently noble to justify violence; the violence duly ensued, but freedom was lost in the process. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1325:International law tends to take a back seat when a major power asserts a right to protect vital security interests. Indeed, when a great power needs a threat to justify its intervention in another state, it invariably finds one. There is thus a long political history of world powers quoting international law to others but ignoring it when it comes in their way. The Ukraine case illustrates the international law of convenience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1326:Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry. ~ Ernst Haas, #NFDB
1327:Here’s the deal, y’all. God. Already. Knows. His people are a hot, sinful mess, so when we simply acknowledge that and repent, He’s waiting with open arms. We don’t have to justify ourselves because Jesus already did that on the cross. So the risk of repentance doesn’t lead to punishment—it leads to the unilateral forgiveness and unconditional affection of our Creator Redeemer. Vegas only wished it had a payout that humongous. ~ Lisa Harper, #NFDB
1328:Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. ~ Kiran Nagarkar, #NFDB
1329:But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1330:Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can't see when we're in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection, and that we are making this projection to justify ourselves in self-betrayal. We cannot see that it's not others' actions but our accusations that result in our feeling offended. ~ C Terry Warner, #NFDB
1331:There's enough ugliness - you know, we got wars going on and people dying and sickness and everything. We don't need to have our art be ugly. But it is, in a lot of it. And these people justify this crap by saying, "Oh we're just representing what's out there, man". Basically, you're making it worse and number one, the artist's job is to elevate people and to lift people up and to give them a place to go, something to hold on to. ~ Don McLean, #NFDB
1332:felt abandoned by her when she drank, but as long as I wasn’t hurt and she was accounted for and alive, I could justify that everything was all right. Never really knowing what I was going to come home to established a constant underlying sense of anxiety in my gut. I remained unrealistically optimistic that every day would be different. Mom would keep her promise and not get drunk at that birthday or that particular function. ~ Brooke Shields, #NFDB
1333:It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law. ~ Otto Weininger, #NFDB
1334:It was getting late. I was tired and confused. “Do you believe it’s okay to lie sometimes?” Myron put down the slice and wiped his hands on a napkin. “Sure.” “Just like that?” “Just like that. It’s the eternal question—do the ends justify the means?” “And do they?” Myron smiled. “If anyone has a sure answer to that one, be wary. Anyone who answers definitely yes or definitely no is someone who isn’t thinking things through.” “So ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1335:The chicken noticed that the farmer came every day to feed it. It predicted that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. Inductivists think that the chicken had "extrapolated" its observations into a theory, and that each feeding time added justification to that theory. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken's neck. This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusion. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1336:They looked at the world around them and saw that the government was a ball of wasteful red tape; that the taxi industry treated customers like shit; hotels overcharged and overtaxed; health care was a sham, driven by the needs of the insurance agencies, not the sick; oil-dependent cars had helped to justify an eternal war in the Middle East; and illegal drugs were only illegal because the government wanted to control the people. ~ Nick Bilton, #NFDB
1337:«How do we justify calling ourselves civilised, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief ando of common values which strech back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilised if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbours ara massacred, your lanas laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?» ~ Iain Pears, #NFDB
1338:It is like using a smoke screen, the same thing for an individual. The topic here is Islam. If French politicians are no longer talking about Islam, they know they will have to talk about something else, which brings the spotlight on their inefficiency. They will have to talk about domestic social and economic issues and they will have to justify their foreign policy, which is obviously something they need to avoid at all costs. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1339:The only way to overcome the fallacious beliefs of our mind is to analyse the truth ourselves. Treat the world—including yourself—as a book and learn all lessons from it. If you spend a little time everyday analysing the reasons why something has gone right or wrong, not with a view to justify it but only for knowing the truth and the hidden laws of the world, you would start dropping your false hood one by one and become wiser. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
1340:The other piece of this is that we call for cutting our bloated and dangerous military budget. And this is something that is made possible by moving to 100% clean renewable energy, where we cannot justify wars for oil, and where we cannot justify having some 700, 800 bases gathered around the world in something like 100 countries in significant measure protecting either access to fossil fuels or protecting routes of transportation. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
1341:Most of the founders of postmodernism were Europeans who had witnessed oppressive political systems up close—Nazism and Communism. Both these systems were organized around a single principle: race (Nazism) or economic class (Communism). Both embraced a grand vision of history moving inexorably toward some ideal society. And both ended up becoming totalitarian, using their utopian visions to justify secret police and death camps. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
1342:I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
1343:The Framers feared and detested factions, a view famously expressed by Madison in Federalist No. 10.31 Probably no statement has been so often cited to explain and justify the checks against popular majorities that the Framers attempted to build into the constitution. It is supremely ironic, therefore, that more than anyone except Jefferson, it was Madison who helped to create the Republican Party in order to defeat the Federalists. ~ Robert A Dahl, #NFDB
1344:It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law. . . . ~ Otto Weininger, #NFDB
1345:As Elders we have great respect for all religions and traditions as important forces that bind people together. Faith and tradition provide much of the foundation of our laws and social codes. But where religion and tradition are used to justify discrimination and especially when they are used to justify cruel and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, infanticide and child marriage, then we believe that is unacceptable. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
1346:Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control. ~ Alfie Kohn, #NFDB
1347:But you believe in something?” She frowns, uncertain. “I really don’t know. I guess I’m more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can’t it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we’re born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
1348:You should always be prepared to defend your choices, whether just to yourself (sometimes this is the hardest) or to your coworkers, your friends, or your family. The quickest way for people to lose confidence in your ability to ever make a decision is for you to pass the buck, shrug your shoulders, or otherwise wuss out. Learning how to become a decision maker, and how you ultimately justify your choices, can define who you are. ~ Alyssa Mastromonaco, #NFDB
1349:So when you and I are tempted to criticize someone tomorrow, let’s remember Al Capone, “Two Gun” Crowley and Albert Fall. Let’s realize that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
1350:I can't justify taking one minute of free time for myself. I'm restless to do things. Anything! Hell, I'll watch Top Chef and I think, "God, maybe I could be a chef," I'll watch a dancing show and think, "God, maybe I can be a dancer." I mean, that's how I got into acting. I visited an improv show and thought, "Hey! I could do this." It sounds like arrogance, but I don't think it is... just an ambition to reach out and touch something new. ~ Steven Yeun, #NFDB
1351:It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect. ~ Byron White, #NFDB
1352:There are entire professions that justify their existence only in terms of fluency in a self-referential system. A person’s actions might be completely banal in reality, but a description of them using these specialized terms would make them sound like high science. It’s no wonder Julian likes jargon. Jargon is a fraudulent form of significance, in which the person who is speaking automatically seems to know what he’s doing. This ~ Daniel Domscheit Berg, #NFDB
1353:One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1354:Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. 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, #NFDB
1355:IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us. ~ Huey Newton, #NFDB
1356:My real purpose in telling middle-school students stories was to practice telling stories. And I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. And the way I would justify it to the head teacher if he came in or to any parents who complained was, look, I'm telling these great stories because they're part of our cultural heritage. I did believe that. ~ Philip Pullman, #NFDB
1357:there is no need to justify what we are. there is no need to work hard to become what we are not. we just need to return to our intergrity, to the way we were before we learned to speak. perfect. as little children, we are authentic. only the present time is real for us; wo don't care about the past, and we aren't worried about the future. we enjoy life; we want to explore and have fun. nobody teaches us to be that way; we are born that way. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
1358:I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too - a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality. ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
1359:I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer, #NFDB
1360:It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, ‘maturity,’ suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1361:Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
1362:There are two answers to evil,” she said. “The first is to justify it. The evil that you do is for a good cause, you’ll be validated in the end, it needed to be done, etcetera, etcetera. Of course, once you start walking that road, it’s all downhill. I’m sure this Tony person didn’t start by drowning children. You have to work your way up to that kind of atrocity.” “And the second answer?” “You own it. Be truthful and accept your own nature. ~ Craig Schaefer, #NFDB
1363:The struggle between good and evil / is the primal disease of the mind,” wrote the sixth-century Zen master Seng-ts’an, who knew what he was talking about. It is all too easy to see ourselves as fighting on God’s side, to identify our ideology with what is best for the world and use it to justify crusades, pogroms, or preemptive attacks. Projecting evil onto the world makes me unassailably right—a position as dangerous in politics as in marriage. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1364:Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1365:Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind’s equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They’ll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1366:You don’t need to justify what I do. I do what I have to do to survive because that’s all I know. I don’t make excuses, I own it. This is me, this is who I am, this is my life. It shames me but not enough to stop. At one point, this was all about revenge; it was about getting the men who got my father and my mother. But somewhere along the way, I forgot about the beast. Vengeance is a beast, you know. It can be tamed. I just stopped feeding it. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
1367:I must make MAGICK the essential factor in the life of ALL. In presenting this book to the world, I must then explain and justify my position by formulating a definition of MAGICK and setting forth its main principles in such a way that ALL may understand instantly that their souls, their lives, in every relation with every other human being and every circumstance, depend upon MAGICK and the right comprehension and right application thereof. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
1368:There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and others people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends...Just as real repentance begins only where blame shifting ends, so it also begins where self-pity ends, and we start to turn from our sin out of love for God rather than mere self-interest. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
1369:there is no need to justify what we are. there is no need to work hard to become what we are not. we just need to return to our intergrity, to the way we were before we learned to speak. perfect. as little children, we are authentic. only the present time is real for us; wo don't care about the past, and we aren't worried about the future. we enjoy life; we want to explore and have fun. nobody teaches us to be that way; we are born that way. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz, #NFDB
1370:But this tacit understanding (admitting it to exist) cannot at all justify the conclusion drawn from it. A tacit understanding between A, B, and C, that they will, by ballot, depute D as their agent, to deprive me of my property, liberty, or life, cannot at all authorize D to do so. He is none the less a robber, tyrant, and murderer, because he claims to act as their agent, than he would be if he avowedly acted on his own responsibility alone. ~ Lysander Spooner, #NFDB
1371:Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1372:the notion that it was good, well even if you don't believe that because maybe it's not as good as it could be. I would say it's incumbent on you as someone who participates in the process of furthering creation to act as if it could be good at least and to further that with all of your efforts. Partly because what the hell else do you have to do that could possible be better than that, that could possible justify your existence more than that? ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1373:Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind’s equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They’ll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. And ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1374:the notion that it was good, well even if you don't believe that because maybe it's not as good as it could be. I would say it's incumbent on you as someone who participates in the process of furthering creation to act as if it could be good at least and to further that with all of your efforts. Partly because what the hell else do you have to do that could possible be better than that, that could possible justify your existence more than that? ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1375:I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. ~ James Salter, #NFDB
1376:Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process. ~ Gordon S Wood, #NFDB
1377:It is, thus, perfectly possible - indeed, it is common - to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one's life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1378:To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial minorities on the assumption that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment, and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming. It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
1379:Blind faith can justify anything.* If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1380:Are you asking me if I did something to deserve Gem tripping me and calling me a whore, a slut, and a fat ugly bitch? Seriously? You are asking me that?"
"The answer is no. I have not touched a single guy in this school or actually pretty much ever, not that that would justify a fellow student calling me a whore or a slut. And as for the 'fat ugly bitch'? I presume that's subjective." . . .
"Do you need my BMI? I'm sure that can be arranged. ~ Julie Buxbaum,#NFDB
1381:It felt like so many years' worth of anxiety and worry were trying to escape all at once—maybe like an emotional volcano, only my mom and dad, they didn't run away to save themselves but sprinted right into my lava. They both jumped up off the couch and wrapped their arms around me even though it meant touching each other. We stayed like that for a long time, and it felt good—almost enough to justify everything that had precipitated it, but not quite. ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
1382:I was stricken by news and television pictures coming from the United States this morning. It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people. There can be no cause or grievance that could ever justify such unspeakable violence. Indeed, such an attack is an assault not only on the targets but an offense against the freedom and rights of all civilized nations. ~ Jean Chretien, #NFDB
1383:Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn't try and justify themselves or tell each other it was a malign god who made them play in trees. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1384:Newton was open and honest about his weaknesses, and this honesty marked his entire forty-year ministry. Nothing in his service was not in some way “debased, polluted, and spoiled by my depraved nature.” “I am a riddle to myself,” he wrote, “a heap of inconsistence.”20 This was never an excuse to shrug off obedience or justify scandalous sin, but it was a disclosure of grace intended to break and humble him. Every Christian must feel something of the same. ~ Tony Reinke, #NFDB
1385:We increasingly justify such heightened involvement with our children as essential to their survival. We keep them on speed dial. We watch them on Skype. We track their movements. We expect every call to be answered, every changed plan reported. We fantasize unprecedented new dangers in their every unsupervised encounter. We mention terrorism, we share anxious admonitions: “It’s different now.” “It’s not the way it was.” “You can’t let them do what we did. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1386:When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger. ~ Carl Rogers, #NFDB
1387:When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger. ~ Carl R Rogers, #NFDB
1388:In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1389:Blurring the line between possible and impossible, linear and non-linear time, fiction and reality, fate and free will, 1Q84 is both a metaphysical mind-teaser and a fast-paced thriller where the stakes for Tengo and Aomame couldn’t be any higher. Murakami’s most ambitious novel to date, 1Q84 is also an extraordinary love story, a story about the power of a single moment of deep connection to transcend time and space—and justify even the greatest of risks. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1390:For an important intellectual product to be immediately weighty, a deep relationship or concordance has to exist between the life of its creator and the general lives of the people. These people are generally unaware why exactly they praise a certain work of art. Far from being truly knowledgeable, they perceive it to have a hundred different benefits to justify their adulation; but the real underlying reason for their behavior cannot be measured, is sympathy. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
1391:simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1392:One thing is certain: Once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11, was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism. ~ Masha Gessen, #NFDB
1393:There is, it is true, an idealistic theory according to which democracy is the best form of government. I think myself that this theory is true. But there is no department of practical politics where idealistic theories are strong enough to cause great changes; when great changes occur, the theories which justify them are always a camouflage for passion. And the passion that has given driving force to democratic theories is undoubtedly the passion of envy. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1394:Whatever I was, I owed to my family and to all those who struggled with me. But my biggest debt I owed to my wife. She was the one who gave my life meaning. All I could pledge to her, and to all those millions, was that I would do all I could to justify the faith that she, and they, had in me. I would try more than ever to make my life one of which she, and they, could be proud. I would do in private that which I knew my public responsibility demanded. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1395:An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connexion can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1396:The decision to attack the entire nation [of Yugoslavia] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. ... The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
1397:But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson - not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined - ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1398:While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything. The ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1399:So I’m a hypocrite,” Myron said. “Happy?” “But that is my point,” Win said. “What?” “You’re not a hypocrite. You aim toward lofty heights. The fact that your arrow cannot always reach them does not make you a hypocrite.” “So in conclusion,” Myron said, “the ends do not justify the means. Except sometimes.” Win spread his hands. “See? I just saved you hours of soul-searching. Perhaps I should consider penning one of those how-to-manage-your-time manuals.” Esperanza ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1400:Nothing could’ve been more easy to predict, than that it was of no avail for him to have right on his side when his adversary had influence and wealth, and therefore could so victoriously justify any extravagancies that he might think proper to commit. This maxim was completely illustrated in the sequel. Wealth and despotism easily know how to engage those laws as coadjutors of their oppression, which were perhaps at first intended for the safeguards of the poor. ~ William Godwin, #NFDB
1401:If God were to end history and reign forever in a distant Heaven, Earth would be remembered as a graveyard of sin and failure. Instead, Earth will be redeemed and resurrected. In the end it will be a far greater world, even for having gone through the birth pains of suffering and sin—yes, even sin. The New Earth will justify the old Earth’s disaster, make good out of it, putting it in perspective. It will preserve and perpetuate Earth’s original design and heritage. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
1402:Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well. I heard some computer fool say that religion is the 'older virtual reality' experience, to justify his scam industry. No, the denuded state of the spirit and intellect, where you walk around 'demystified' and 'disenchanted' is the virtual reality condition, and a terrible condition at that. ~ Bronze Age Pervert, #NFDB
1403:Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1404:I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1405:Life—is What We Make Of It
698
Life—is what we make of it—
Death—we do not know—
Christ's acquaintance with Him
Justify Him—though—
He—would trust no stranger—
Other—could betray—
Just His own endorsement—
That—sufficeth Me—
All the other Distance
He hath traversed first—
No New Mile remaineth—
Far as Paradise—
His sure foot preceding—
Tender Pioneer—
Base must be the Coward
Dare not venture—now—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1406:The ends do not justify the means. If our actions will bring harm to others, even in the service of some 'good,' they are almost certainly deluded. If our actions do not come from a kind heart, from loving courage and compassion, they are deluded. If they are based on a distinction between 'us' and 'them,' they stem from delusion. Only to the extent that we act from the wisdom of no separation, understanding how we are woven together, will our intention bring benefit. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1407:Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
1408:It was a shame that Allah, Jehovah, God—it didn’t matter what name you gave him—did not live in the world today, because if he did, we would still be in paradise, while he would be mired in appeals, requests, demands, injunctions, preliminary verdicts, and would have to justify to innumerable tribunals his decision to expel Adam and Eve from paradise for breaking an arbitrary rule with no foundation in law: Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1409:Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1410:Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
1411:In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1412:The devil lives in the shadow of subtle things--those things people keep hidden from others. They reside in the lies they tell themselves, in order to justify their pain or fear. It is the slight, the dig, the silence and the unspoken truth that we minimize to a passive aggressive status, as if it were a lesser evil. Integrity is not subtle. It speaks loudly, so everyone can hear and be healed. It is something you will never have to search for because it is seen and felt. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
1413:In the 17 years since I graduated from this great College of Law, I have seen that, for many of us, it becomes increasingly easy to rationalize our actions in the name of expediency when facing difficult decisions-to choose a path where the ends justify the means. I want to ask you to challenge Machiavelli's philosophy. I want to humbly suggest that you be the guardians of a more complicated truth: that the means are as important-and sometimes even more important-than the ends. ~ Beau Biden, #NFDB
1414:There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems, from African slavery to the Nazi Holocaust. When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous. ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
1415:The Shah regarded politics as the province of demagoguery, an art in which only charlatans could excel. He had no time for what he saw as the tedious process of achieving consensus through debate and discussion and tried to justify his solitary exercise of power by insisting it was what Iran needed to catch up with lost time. He believed he was more patriotic than anyone else and needed no advice on how best to promote and protect the highest interests of the nation. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, #NFDB
1416:So yes, religion has caused and continues to cause some of the worst violence in history. And yes, it has used God to justify it. So if we mean by God the loving creator of the universe, then either he doesn’t exist or religion has got him wrong. Either way, religion should make us wary. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should abandon it altogether. We may decide to stick with it but to do so with humility, admitting the evil it has done as well as the good. It’s up to us. ~ Richard Holloway, #NFDB
1417:To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1418:So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species? ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
1419:What, then, is patriotism? “Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels,” said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1420:When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men. ~ Frantz Fanon, #NFDB
1421:Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, #NFDB
1422:What, then, is patriotism? "Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average working man. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1423:Often when you go into a relationship with someone you like, you have to justify why you like that person. You only see what you want to see and you deny there are things you don’t like about that person. You lie to yourself just to make yourself right. Then you make assumptions, and one of the assumptions is “My love will change this person.” But this is not true. Your love will not change anybody. If others change, it’s because they want to change, not because you can change them. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1424:Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
1425:Attaching terror to murder-attacks is mainly a political maneuver done through downplaying the loss of life on public stage to justify any later-on upcoming collateral damages. Although this apparatus of deception was intentionally developed in the west, but its origins lies in being touched by constitutional confusion (i.e., gentilehood); it is Caesar's own way of claiming unto himself that what is God's. It is also a linguistic talisman used to capitalize remotely upon death. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
1426:One should be wary, however, of the conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes. There is some truth in this view, but since the early nineteenth century it has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1427:How often in our lives have we withheld the truth from someone we’re supposed to love? We justify it by telling ourselves we’re doing them some kindness, when in reality, we’re just being selfish. We don’t want them to know the truth because if they did, well, they might not love us anymore. How many of us have ever felt that no one would love us if they knew the real us? Love bears all things, the Bible tells us. The truth is, everyone who really loves you can bear the real you. ~ Erin O Riordan, #NFDB
1428:So what conclusions can we draw? Both sides quite possibly used sarin. Both sides lied and manipulated evidence. At a minimum, the Obama administration exaggerated its case to justify a military attack on Syria. At worst, the White House fabricated intelligence. Bottom line: no one has yet presented convincing evidence of who perpetrated the horrific Al Ghouta attack. But one thing remains clear: the Al Ghouta massacre changed US policy, and not in the way President Obama intended. ~ Reese Erlich, #NFDB
1429:Comtesse Molé did not justify the extraordinary reputation for intelligence that she had acquired, which made one think of those mediocre actors or novelists who, at certain periods, are hailed as men of genius, either because of the mediocrity of their competitors, among whom there is no artist capable of revealing what is meant by true talent, or because of the mediocrity of the public, which, did there exist an extraordinary individuality, would be incapable of understanding it. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1430:My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1431:He knew he was overfastidious. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space?
You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence. ~ John Fowles,#NFDB
1432:I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
1433:Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human. ~ Primo Levi, #NFDB
1434:Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
1435:He must present Belgium as the cause without hiding France as the basic cause; he must appeal to Britain’s honor while making it clear that Britain’s interest was the deciding factor; he must stand where a tradition of debate on foreign affairs had flourished for three hundred years and, without the brilliance of Burke or the force of Pitt, without Canning’s mastery or Palmerston’s jaunty nerve, without the rhetoric of Gladstone or the wit of Disraeli, justify the course of British ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
1436:There’s a phrase that critics of economic forecasting like to use: Give an economist a result you want, and he’ll find the numbers to justify it. This entire city is filled with number crunchers who look at the exact same data and interpret it in widely disparate ways on everything from the federal budget deficit to the Social Security surplus.” “Meaning that data can be manipulated.” “Of course it can, depending on who’s paying the meter and whose political agenda is being furthered, ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
1437:But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least. ~ Jenny Diski, #NFDB
1438:Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
1439:Using vile means to attain worthy ends makes the ends themselves vile. Let them ride on the backs of doctors and medical assistants, but why lie to the people? Why assure the people they are right in their ignorance and that their crude prejudices are sacred truth? Can any splendid future possibly justify this basr lie? Were I a politician, I could never make up my mind to shame my present for the sake of the future, even though I might be promised tons of bliss for a pinch of foul lying. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1440:the ways Black people are portrayed as the ultimate evil to justify historically and currently our exploitation, containment, and murders; the fact that for Black people and other people of color, the history of slavery, genocide, white supremacy, and colonialism is the only true horror story, and it is one we continue to live every day; and the fact that resistance of the oppressed to these structures has always been seen as the most frightful abomination that could be birthed. Through ~ Walidah Imarisha, #NFDB
1441:When I say that terrorism is war against civilization, I may be met by the objection that terrorists are often idealists pursuing worthy ultimate aims -- national or regional independence, and so forth. I do not accept this argument. I cannot agree that a terrorist can ever be an idealist, or that the objects sought can ever justify terrorism. The impact of terrorism, not merely on individual nations, but on humanity as a whole, is intrinsically evil, necessarily evil and wholly evil. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu, #NFDB
1442:When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1443:a frantic stream of words flows from us because we are in a constant process of adjusting our public image. we fear so deeply what we think, other people see in us that we talk in order to straighten out their understanding..... one of the fruits of silence (or keeping your mouth shut) is the freedom to let God be our justifier. we don't need to straighten out others. when we can allow God to justify and set things right, that brings us to believe that God can care for us-reputation and all ~ Hayley DiMarco, #NFDB
1444:We will be whatever they need us to be. Call us emo's, liars, and cheaters...tell people how awful we are and how little talent we have...do whatever it takes to make themselves feel better because at the end of the day, we are strong, we can take it. We don't need their approval to justify our lives. Each and every one of us has a fire that burns inside us and they can try like hell to put out that flame but as long as in our minds we know who we are meant to be, they don't stand a chance. ~ Andy Biersack, #NFDB
1445:Neighbors were divided on the question of whether Mrs. Braden had been excessive in her reaction. Witnesses agreed that Jesse had been a prodigious sinner, and often conducted himself in a manner that invited homicide. The shooting itself was not so much at issue as Mrs. Braden's selection of anatomical targets. The men in the crowd, sober and otherwise, felt that the mere spilling of an alcoholic beverage--and subsequent insensitive laughter--failed to justify three bullets through the penis. ~ Carl Hiaasen, #NFDB
1446:The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher. ~ Robert Scheer, #NFDB
1447:During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
1448:For some reason I didn't believe it. I don't know why. Maybe it was because my father was the kind of person who told himself things over and over until he believed them, who could justify almost anything. What I wanted was for it to really be okay. I wanted him to really not care, to maybe even be happy about it. Instead he was acting like I was making a bad career choice, like I was passing up an English degree at Fairmont in favor of a bartending certificate at the local community college. ~ Nick Burd, #NFDB
1449:People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of reading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book. ~ Joshua Meyrowitz, #NFDB
1450:Drafting of the constitutions is interesting and the discussions around them revealing in many ways. I take it as a discussion of very important symbols revealing many different problems. My take at the beginning was to warn that Tunisia might be the only successful country, the only one to justify us in talking about the spring, while all the other countries were less successful, if not failing. Now the point is that even in Tunisia it is not going to be easy, and this is where we have a problem. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1451:I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1452:The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1453:Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely planters to drown and justify their solitary gins, mingled with the scent of frangipani from their leafy, insect-ridden gardens, and the soothing clink of ice against glass was only disturbed by the occasional slap of a frustrated palm against a reddening spot just vacated by an anglovorous mosquito. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
1454:We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases? ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
1455:There are striking parallels between the Abbasid revolution and the Islamic State revolution. They share a name (dawla), symbols and colors, apocalyptic propaganda, clandestine networks, and an insurgency in Syria and Iraq. They also claim the right to rule as the Prophet’s descendants. The Abbasids had provided a blueprint for how to overthrow a Muslim ruler, establish a new caliphate, and justify both. Apocalypse, caliphate, and revolution were inseparable, just as they are for the Islamic State. ~ William McCants, #NFDB
1456:To be sure, repression must also allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down. Let's be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1457:You could ask: Why are people attracted to narratives that justify the terrible things that we're doing to the planet? Why are people attracted to narratives of control and fear and hunting down the terrorists, and this uncaring attitude toward nature? These come from what I call the perceptions of separation and the experience of separation, the experience of alienation, the experience of scarcity and anxiety and competition, and a world in which everybody is out for themselves and nobody cares. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1458:[Christ's] mission and work it is to help against sin and death, to justify and bring life. He has placed his help in baptism and the Sacrament [i.e., communion/Eucharist/Lord's supper], and incorporated it in the Word and preaching. To our eyes Baptism [capitalized in original] appears to be nothing more than ordinary water, and the Sacrament of Christ's body and blood simple bread and wine, like other bread and wine, and the sermon, hot air from a man's mouth. But we must not trust what our eyes see. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1459:Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us. Viewing ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1460:Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), #NFDB
1461:Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself. ~ C Wright Mills, #NFDB
1462:I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful! ~ Frank O Hara, #NFDB
1463:I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful! ~ Frank O Hara, #NFDB
1464:If I wanted, I could come up with reasons to be angry with everyone I know; there are sins of commission or omission I could hang on every last person in my life… The truth is, I will never run out of people to indict. We are all guilty of so many failures to love well that if I wanted--and sometimes I do want--I could find some fault or transgression in everyone I know that I could then use to justify writing them off. I could blaze that trail to hell if I wanted to, and just the thought of it scares me off ~ Russ Ramsey, #NFDB
1465:In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated European notions of humanity to predominance in the world, posited the white male as the apotheosis of the ideal of the Enlightenment, and did so by fiat and military power. In the process imperial historians wrote the ‘history’ of their subject peoples in tendentious terms to explain and justify their own imperium. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
1466:Gaston Boissier, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century what is still one of the most charming and witty books on Cicero, observed: He always belonged to the best party [i.e., the optimates] … only he made it a rule not to serve his party; he was contented with giving it his good wishes. But these good wishes were the warmest imaginable.… His reserve only began when it was necessary to act.… The more we think about it, the less we can imagine the reasons he could give [his friends] to justify his conduct. ~ Anthony Everitt, #NFDB
1467:I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1468:In the old days when war and its consequences, brutality and conquest and enslavement of a people, were accepted as belonging to the natural order of events, there was no particular need to cover them or justify them from some other point of view. With the growth of higher standards the need for justification has arisen, and this leads to a perversion of facts, sometimes deliberate, often unconscious. Thus hypocrisy pays its tribute to virtue, and a false and sickening piety allies itself to evil deeds. In ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
1469:I wrote my histories and observations. I captured my thoughts and ideas and memories in words on vellum and paper. So much I stored, and thought it was mine. I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. Perhaps I sought to justify myself, not just all I had done, but who I had become. For years, I wrote faithfully nearly every evening, carefully explaining my world and my life to myself. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
1470:Replaying in my mind the Martha Stewart, Leonidas Young, and Scooter Libby cases, I argued that if we weren’t going to hold retired generals and CIA directors accountable for blatantly lying during investigations, how could we justify jailing thousands of others for doing the same thing? I believed, and still believe, that Petraeus was treated under a double standard based on class. A poor person, an unknown person—say a young black Baptist minister from Richmond—would be charged with a felony and sent to jail. ~ James Comey, #NFDB
1471:The ends-“
“Justify the means. That’s what she said. What is that, your family motto or something?”
Lara stilled, her knuckles white. “Would you like to know about my family, Sophie?”
Pressing myself back against my chair, I shook my head. “I think I know enough about your family, thanks.”
“You don’t know anything,” Lara said, and then she flicked her fingers in my direction.
At first, nothing happened, and I wondered if all she’d done was give me the witch version of her middle finger. ~ Rachel Hawkins,#NFDB
1472:That’s to say, understanding Adrian’s reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied criticism of the rest of us? No. Or at least, I’m sure he didn’t intend it as such. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1473:Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six-minute films, each of which might cost as much as two million dollars to make, certainly don’t yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they’re hard to justify. What sustains them is a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1474:..., like the pharmaceutical industry's hypocrisy. They want people to think their motivation is for the public good when they are, in fact, poster boys for capitalism run amok."
"You mean how they justify their out-of-the-ballpark prices supposedly because of how much money they have to spend on research."
"The reality is that they spend more money on advertising prescription drugs directly to the public than they spend on research. And that doesn't even include the money they spend on lobbyists and politicians. ~ Robin Cook,#NFDB
1475:Not even seven thousand years of joy can justify seven days of repression. To the woman who is here tonight, may she be each and every one of us, may her example spread, may she still have many difficult days ahead, so that she can complete her work, so that, for the generations to come, the meaning of ‘injustice’ will be found only in dictionary definitions and never in the lives of human beings. And may she travel slowly, because her pace is the pace of change, and change, real change, always takes a very long time. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1476:The confusion, the difficulties, the contradictions which, in consequence of a want of accurate distinctions in this particular, have up to even a recent period encumbered mathematics in all those branches involving the consideration of negative and impossible quantities, will at once occur to the reader who is at all versed in this science, and would alone suffice to justify dwelling somewhat on the point, in connexion with any subject so peculiarly fitted to give forcible illustration of it as the Analytical Engine. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
1477:The myth of pure evil depicts innocent victims fighting against gratuitously wicked, sadistic enemies. The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it. As we will soon see, belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good. ~ Roy F Baumeister, #NFDB
1478:But still, what does the flying disc problem really solve? For those who currently commute, if a sensor network eradicated traffic so that they could reclaim that time for another purpose, would a flying disc really matter? Would skyways of the future prove safer than the highways we already have? For those who use public transit, would a disc traveling as the crow flies justify spending a lot of money on a new kind of vehicle and the infrastructure to operate it? Would the average person come to rely on it as a necessity? ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
1479:Whenever Muslim 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. It utilizes psychology to say that women are emotional. It utilizes medical science to say that men's brains are formed in such a way that they are better able to understand concepts. These are all hypotheses. None of this has been proven. ~ Shirin Ebadi, #NFDB
1480:It seemed clear to Wilson that what the rationalists were really doing was generating clever justifications for moral intuitions that were best explained by evolution. Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1481:See? Nothing to it."
"I see all right," Carly said, her tone full of awe. She gaped at him.
"What?"
"Um..."
"Jesus, Carly, what is it?" He spun around to make sure there wasn't something behind him that would justify her reaction and the look of impressed astonishment on her face.
"You... Maybe the current was a little faster than you thought."
He followed the direction of her gaze and discovered he had lost his boxers. He snickered. She giggled. They both burst into laughter, and Justin flushed a little. ~ Lissa Bryan,#NFDB
1482:Brené Brown warned us we can’t selectively numb our emotions, and no doubt this applies to the emotions we have about our faith. If the slaughter of Canaanite children elicits only a shrug, then why not the slaughter of Pequots? Of Syrians? Of Jews? If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we find the courage to challenge interpretations that justify injustice? How will we know when we’ve got it wrong? ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
1483:Geisler and Van Gordon have done both Christians and non-Christians a great service by writing Somewhere under the Rainbow: A Christian Look at Same-sex “Marriage.” They furnish concise yet comprehensive answers to the objections and alternate “interpretations” of God’s Word employed by same-sex apologists to justify their lifestyle. Importantly, they also compose a compelling narrative of how Jesus is the answer to same-sex attraction and how the Church can witness and minister to those mired in such a life style. Van ~ Norman L Geisler, #NFDB
1484:We come finally, however, to the relation of the ideal theory to real world, or "real" probability. If he is consistent a man of the mathematical school washes his hands of applications. To someone who wants them he would say that the ideal system runs parallel to the usual theory: "If this is what you want, try it: it is not my business to justify application of the system; that can only be done by philosophizing; I am a mathematician". In practice he is apt to say: "try this; if it works that will justify it". ~ John Edensor Littlewood, #NFDB
1485:I feel more comfortable in my own skin now than I ever have...I think there's something about loving Kai [her son] so much, in a way that I've never loved anyone, including myself. Also, I used to spend a lot of time alone, but he's this incredibly social kind of guy, so all of a sudden I'm always having people in and out of my house. It's changed the way I feel as a citizen of the world. And it's really important to me to feel good about what I'm working on, to justify the number of hours I'd have to be away from him. ~ Jennifer Connelly, #NFDB
1486:The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholely ‘useless’ (and this is true of ‘applied’ as of ‘pure’ mathematics). It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the ‘utility’ of his work.… The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as ‘useless’ as the theory of numbers. It ~ Andrew Hodges, #NFDB
1487:Gene and Claudia tried for a while to assist me with the Wife Problem. Unfortunately, their approach was based on the traditional dating paradigm, which I had previously abandoned on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences. I am thirty-nine years old, tall, fit and intelligent, with a relatively high status and above-average income as an associate professor. Logically, I should be attractive to a wide range of women. In the animal kingdom, I would succeed in reproducing. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
1488:I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1489:My aim is to lay bare and proclaim the crying and horrible guilt of the bloody doctrine of persecution as one of the most seditious, destructive, blasphemous, and bloodiest in any or all the nations of the world, notwithstanding the many fine veils, pretenses, and colors of not persecuting Christ Jesus, but heretics; not God's truth or servants, but blasphemers and seducers; not persecuting men for their conscience, but for sinning against their conscience; and like specious reasonings to justify the cruelty of intolerance. ~ Roger Williams, #NFDB
1490:She had always suffered from a curious fear of what was going to happen round the next corner. Even when life went smoothly and nothing occurred to justify her vague apprehensions, they did not altogether disperse. She had tried to face these fears and conquer them, but she could never do so entirely, she could only strain forward into the darkness of the future, expecting and fearing the unknown. She was brave in the face of dangers she could see, but she could not arm herself against shadows. These fears were her weakness. ~ D E Stevenson, #NFDB
1491: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. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1492:No man, however enslaved to his appetites, or hurried by his passions, can, while he preserves his intellects unimpaired, please himself with promoting the corruption of others. He whose merit has enlarged his influence would surely wish to exert it for the benefit of mankind. Yet such will be the effect of his reputation, while he suffers himself to indulge in any favourite fault, that they who have no hope to reach his excellence will catch at his failings, and his virtues will be cited to justify the copiers of his vices. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1493:Life is made of moments and choices. Not all of them matter, or have any lasting impact Then there's a different kind of moment. One when things are irrevocably changed by a choice we make. A moment we will play endlessly in our minds on lonely nights and empty days So we explain it to ourselves, justify it enough to sleep. And then we bury it deep, so deep we can almost pretend it never happened. But as much as we wish it were different, the truth is, our worlds are sometimes balanced on choices we make and the secrets we keep. ~ Jessi Kirby, #NFDB
1494:Nutritionists don't stop there, because they can't: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. These new nutritionists have a major commercial problem with the evidence. There's nothing very professional or proprietary about 'Eat your greens,' so they have had to push things further. But unfortunately for them, the technical, confusing, overcomplicated, tinkering interventions that they promote - the enzymes, the exotic berries - are very frequently not supported by convincing evidence. ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
1495:Irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble. I define a speculative bubble as a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler's excitement. ~ Robert J Shiller, #NFDB
1496:The thing creators have to remember is that to a very real extent they are fictional characters to their fans—and that what fans want (the product they like, they way they like it, served up by someone who they often see as being just like them, only more interesting/exciting/successful/etc) isn’t always going to conform to what they actually need in their lives. Additionally, fans will construct narratives to justify whatever behavior a creator dishes up…as long as the end result is more of what they want. Enabling! It’s a thing. ~ John Scalzi, #NFDB
1497:With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury’s formulation, every element in the state had an anatomical counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1498:In libel, truth is an absolute defence. If writers and publishers can justify what they say, they may leave the court without punishment. In privacy cases, truth is not a defence but an irrelevance. The law intervenes not because the reports are false, but because they tell too much truth for the subject to cope with, and open him up to mockery, to pain … to disrespect.
Privacy rights allowed the wealthy to suppress criticisms, even though the criticisms were true. They could demand respect, even though they were not respectable. ~ Nick Cohen,#NFDB
1499:In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1500:It is evil to justify killing (unborn babies) by the happy outcome of eternity for the one killed. This same justification could be used to justify killing one-year olds, or any heaven-bound believer for that matter. The Bible asks the question: "Shall we sin that grace may abound?" (Romans 6:1) And: "Shall we do evil that good may come?" (Romans 3:8). In both cases the answer is a resounding NO. It is presumption to step into God's place and try to make the assignments to heaven or to hell. Our duty is to obey God, not to play God. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
130 Integral Yoga
24 Poetry
23 Christianity
18 Philosophy
11 Occultism
10 Psychology
7 Fiction
6 Science
4 Yoga
3 Integral Theory
2 Mythology
2 Mysticism
2 Education
2 Baha i Faith
1 Sufism
1 Buddhism
1 Alchemy
134 Sri Aurobindo
31 The Mother
10 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
10 Nolini Kanta Gupta
9 A B Purani
8 Walt Whitman
8 Satprem
8 Jorge Luis Borges
7 H P Lovecraft
5 Jordan Peterson
5 Friedrich Nietzsche
5 Carl Jung
5 Aleister Crowley
4 Saint Augustine of Hippo
4 Plotinus
4 Plato
4 Aldous Huxley
3 Thubten Chodron
3 Swami Krishnananda
3 Robert Browning
3 Paul Richard
3 Anonymous
2 William Wordsworth
2 Ovid
2 Baha u llah
25 Record of Yoga
25 Letters On Yoga IV
17 The Life Divine
11 The Synthesis Of Yoga
10 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
9 The Human Cycle
9 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
8 Whitman - Poems
7 Lovecraft - Poems
7 Letters On Yoga II
5 The Bible
5 Savitri
5 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
5 Maps of Meaning
5 Labyrinths
5 Essays On The Gita
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
4 The Perennial Philosophy
4 Essays Divine And Human
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
3 The Study and Practice of Yoga
3 The Secret Doctrine
3 The Phenomenon of Man
3 The Future of Man
3 Some Answers From The Mother
3 Questions And Answers 1956
3 Questions And Answers 1954
3 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
3 Mysterium Coniunctionis
3 Magick Without Tears
3 Letters On Yoga I
3 Letters On Poetry And Art
3 Let Me Explain
3 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
3 City of God
3 Browning - Poems
2 Wordsworth - Poems
2 Twilight of the Idols
2 The Secret Of The Veda
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Integral Yoga
2 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
2 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
2 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
2 On Education
2 Metamorphoses
2 Liber ABA
2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
always conspire to justify these doubts, and this for a reason
which is very easy to understand: doubt veils the consciousness
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga, a specialising and separative tendency which, like all things in Nature, had its justifying and even imperative utility and we seek a synthesis of the specialised aims and methods which have, in consequence, come into being.
But in order that we may be wisely guided in our effort, we must know, first, the general principle and purpose underlying this separative impulse and, next, the particular utilities upon which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. For the general principle we must interrogate the universal workings of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective
--
Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
you do not expect me to justify my love in front of the foolish
ignorance of such interpretations. Whether you believe or doubt,
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here we have a pattern of thought-movement that does not seem to follow the lineaments of the normal brain-mind consciousness, although it too has a basis there: our customary line of reasoning receives a sudden shock, as it were, and then is shaken, moved, lifted up, transportedgradually or suddenly, according to the temperament of the listener. Besides, we have here the peculiar modern tone, which, for want of a better term, may be described as scientific. The impressimprimaturof Science is its rational coherence, justifying or justified by sense data, by physical experience, which gives us the pattern or model of an inexorable natural law. Here too we feel we are in the domain of such natural law but lifted on to a higher level.
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all?
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,
All will come near that now is naught or far.
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
faults or weaknesses in myself, something tries to justify
them or to prevent me from attending to them.
0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This concentration on finding the mechanism sprang from the fact that there were disorders in the body which were vanishing and then reappearingpermanent cure seemed impossible. So I told myself, Somewhere, probably in the subconscient, something must be justifying their presence. Then, after concentrating and searching and concentrating some more, suddenly a memory rose up from the subconscient (a memory which is a kind of continued existence under a certain form), the memory of a particular set of movements and actions (not physical movements, but attitudes) that go back many years and had never attracted my attention. None of it had ever been included in the general clearing-out because, like so many other things, it all seemed to be due to normal, ongoing circumstances. But thats just where I saw (what to call it?) the hue, the taint of Falsehood. Its very subtle. These are very subtle things. But suddenly, oh! It caught hold of me and created a revolution in the whole being. All those vibrations were cast up and transformedan extraordinary thing. It stirred up much more commotion and revolution than I had ever expected. And ah! A relief. Something was clarified, bringing a brilliant, new comprehension, and then quite interesting physical results. Before this, I was really feeling rather poorly, extremely tired, with the impression of a decline into decrepituderelatively speaking! (It was in a very superficial part of the being, but it was enough to be disagreeable.) And all of itpfft! Gone in a single stroke.
And that very day, I had this experience with the possessed personit all came together. And then afterwards, a sort of mastery over the problem and the impression of a breakthroughan opening up of the WAY to change, which is this enlargement. First, the movement of generosity (not that shriveling movement, but its exact opposite the movement of expansion), and from there you go on to universality, and from universality to Totality.
0 1962-01-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the degradation of a higher and true movement. It is this or something like it that is attempted crudely and improperly with a rudimentary and insufficient knowledge in the system of psycho-analysis. The process of raising up the lower movements into the full light of consciousness in order to know and deal with them is inevitable; for there can be no complete change without it. But it can truly succeed only when a higher light and force are sufficiently at work to overcome, sooner or later, the force of the tendency that is held up for change. Many, under the pretext of anubhava, not only raise up the adverse movement, but support it with their consent instead of rejecting it, find justifications for continuing or repeating it and so go on playing with it, indulging its return, eternising it; afterwards when they want to get rid of it, it has got such a hold that they find themselves helpless in its clutch and only a terrible struggle or an intervention of divine grace can liberate them.Some do this out of a vital twist or perversity, others out of sheer ignorance; but in yoga, as in life, ignorance is not accepted by Nature as a justifying excuse. This danger is there in all improper dealings with the ignorant parts of the nature; but none is more ignorant, more perilous, more unreasoning and obstinate in recurrence than the lower vital subconscious and its movements. To raise it up prematurely or improperly for anubhava is to risk suffusing the conscious parts also with its dark and dirty stuff and thus poisoning the whole vital and even the mental nature. Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and eliminate them by the strength of the divine calm, light, force and knowledge. Even so, there will be enough of the lower stuff rising up of itself to give you as much of the anubhava as you will need for getting rid of the obstacles; but then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance.
***
0 1963-09-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It would seem to legitimize or justify those who want to escape entirely from the earths atmosphere. The idea would be that the earth is a special experiment of the Supreme in His universe; and those who are not too keen on that experiment (!) prefer to get out of it (to say things somewhat offhandedly).
The difference is this: In one case, the purpose of the earth is a concentration of the Work (which means it can be done more rapidly, consciously and perfectly here), and so there is a serious reason to stay on and do it. In the other case, its just one experiment amidst thousands or millions of others; and if that experiment doesnt particularly appeal to you, to want to get out of it is legitimate.
0 1964-09-16, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
104In all the lakhs of ochre-clad Sannyasins,3 how many are perfect? It is the few attainments and the many approximations that justify an ideal.
105There have been hundreds of perfect Sannyasins, because Sannyasa had been widely preached and numerously practiced; let it be the same with the ideal freedom and we shall have hundreds of Janakas.
0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because it doesnt seem possible to me (though I dont know), it doesnt seem possible to me that the state of the earth is adequate to justify an integral transformation. As for Sri Aurobindo, he used to say that it would come in stages, that there would first be a sort of small formation, or a small creation that will receive the Light and be transformed, and thats what will work as a leaven for the general transformation.
There are all the Christian, Buddhist theories, Shankara, all those who declare that the world is an unreal Falsehood and that it must disappear and give place to a heaven (a new world and a heaven). And this is among the most aspiring elements of mankind, those who arent content with the world as it is, who dont say, Oh, as long as I am here and alive, things are fine; afterwards, I dont careenjoy the short life. Afterwards, well, its over, and thats that; let me make the most of the moment Ive been given. What a queer conception! Thats the other extreme.
0 1969-05-28, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I walked through large rooms in which beings without communication with outside were living. And other rooms where wretched beings were dragging out a wretched life. They took notice of my presence, which seemed to bring them a ray of light from outside. A few reacted well, with a smile; others fled. A few knocked against me. Then I went into other rooms. The same goal always seemed to justify my presence. For, as I went by, a few showed a sign of hope. But at the same time obstacles, sufferings, tortures of all kinds fell on me. They were not deliberately inflicted tortures, but sorts of reactions of ignorance and suffering.
This work progressively became more and more difficult for me. I moved about with difficulty, walked more and more slowly, as though overburdened, until it finally became difficult for me to find my way to escape.
02.04 - The Right of Absolute Freedom, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A nation not free, still in bondage, cannot likewise justify its claim to absolute freedom by all or any means, at all times, in all circumstances. There are times and circumstances when even an enslaved nation has to bide its time. Man, in order to assert his freedom and individuality, cannot sign a pact with Mephistopheles; if he does so he must be prepared for the consequences. The same truth holds with regard to the nation. A greater danger may attend a nation than the loss of freedom the life and soul of humanity itself may be in imminent peril. Such a cataclysmic danger mankind has just passed through or is still passing through. All nations, however circumstanced in the old world, who have stood and fought on the side of humanity, by that very gesture, have acquired the rightand the might too,to gain freedom and greatness and all good things which would not be possible otherwise.
Within the nation all communities must be ready to give and take and settle down amicably. Within humanity too all nations must live the same principle. The days of free competition must be considered as gone for good; instead the rule of collaboration and co-operation has to be adopted (even between past enemies and rivals). In mutual aid and self-limitation lie also the growth and fulfilment of each collective individuality. That is the great Law of Sacrifice enunciated ages ago by Sri Krishna in the Gita"By increasing each other all will attain the Summum Bonum."
02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have said that this Yoga was "new" because it aims at the integrality of the Divine in this world and not only beyond it and at a supramental realisation. But how does that justify a superior contempt for the spiritual realisation which is as much the aim of this Yoga as of any other?
I have never said that my Yoga was something brand new in all its elements. I have called it the integral Yoga and that means that it takes up the essence and many processes of the old Yogas - its newness is in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method. In the earlier stages which is all I deal with in books like the Riddle or the Lights1 there is nothing in it that distinguishes it from the old Yogas except the aim underlying its comprehensiveness, the spirit in its movements and the ultimate significance it keeps before it - also the scheme of its psychology and its working, but as that was not and could not be developed systematically or schematically in these letters, it has not been grasped by those who are not already acquainted with it by mental familiarity or some amount of practice. The detail or method of the later stages of the Yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, Nationalism is also not the summum bonum of collective living. The nation has emerged out of the family and the tribe as a greater unit of the human aggregate. But this does not mean that it is the last word on the subject, that larger units are not to be found or formed. In the present-day juncture it is nationalism that has become a stumbling-block to a fairer solution of human problems. For example, India, Egypt, Ireland, even Poland, whatever may be the justifying reasons, are almost exclusively, chauvinistically, nationalistic. They believe that the attainment of their free, unfettered, separate national existence first will automatically bring in its train all ideal results that have been postponed till now. They do not see, however, that in the actual circumstances an international solution has the greater chance of bringing about a happier solution for the nation too, and not the other way round. The more significant urge today is towards this greater aggregationPan-America, Pan-Russia, Pan-Arabia, a Western European Block and an Eastern European Block are movements that have been thrown up because of 'a greater necessity in human life and its evolution. Man's stupidity, his failure to grasp the situation, his incapacity to march with Nature, his tendency always to fall back, to return to the outdated past may delay or cause a turn or twist in this healthy movement, but it cannot be permanently thwarted or denied for long. Churchill's memorable call to France, on the eve of her debacle, to join and form with Britain a single national union, however sentimental or even ludicrous it may appear to some, is; as we see it, the cry of humanity itself to transcend the modern barriers of nationhood and rise to a higher status of solidarity and collective consciousness.
Internationalism
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow beingsmen and animals, the sentient or the insentient, the entire creation in factis one of identity in the One Self. And therefore he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantist was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the I son or anybody or anything in the world not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or thing but for the sake of the self, for the sake of oneself that is in the object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.01 - The Evolution of Consciousness, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The ascent of the human soul to the supreme Spirit is that soul's highest aim and necessity, for that is the supreme reality; but there can be too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit.
The cycles of evolution tend always upward, but they are cycles and do not ascend in a straight line. The process therefore gives the impression of a series of ascents and descents, but what is essential in the gains of the evolution is kept or, even if eclipsed for a time, reemerges in new forms suitable to the new ages.
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And justify the light on Nature's face.
Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow-beingsmen and animals, the sentient and the insentient, the entire creation, in factis one of identity in the One Self. And, therefore, he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantin was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren, but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world, not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or that thing, but for the sake of the self, for the sake of one's own self that is in the object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The angelic Cordelia is a ray that has strayed down from some higher region, to evolve hereafter, not for immediate fruition and fulfilment. It is the Light that shines always even in this naughty world, a spark of the Grace that still relieves the blight that mars an otherwise sinful earth. She is the symbol of a promise or prophecy that will justify itself sometime in the future, but for the moment the burden of the gloom is too much upon her and she is engulfed in it and sacrificed.
Hamlet, Act II, Sc. 2.
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And the exquisiteness, the special quality of this inner Heart is mostly if not wholly derived from a particular factor of terrestrial evolution. For the journey here is a sacrifice, a passage through pain and suffering, even through frustration and death. The tears that accompany the mortal being in his calvary of an earthly life serve precisely as a holy unction of purification, give a sweet intensity to all his urges in the progressive march to Resurrection. This is the Immanent Divine who has to be worshipped and realised as much as the Transcendent Divine, if man is to fulfil himself wholly and earth justify its existence.
The legend of the great ascetic Sankaracharya going straight to the realisation of the Supreme knowledge in Brahman but obliged to come down and enter into another earthly body for the experience of love, even earthly love, in order to complete his realisation is instructive and illustrates our point.
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I am fortune justifying the great and wise
By the sanction of the plaudits of the crowd,
07.06 - Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This only could justify the labour of sight,
But sight could not define for it a form;
07.34 - And this Agile Reason, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Reason is an agility gymnast. It can move in all varieties of ways, make infinite twists, the most impossible contortions with equal ease and skill. It does not seek the truth, although it may pretend to do so; for it cannot find the truth. The law of uncertainty or indeterminacy seems also to be the last word of modern Science. What Reason does and can do is to justify, find arguments for whatever position it is put in or called upon to support. Its business is to supply proofs: it can do so as the spider brings out of itself the whole warp and woof of the cobweb. There is no truth, that is to say, no conclusion which it cannot demonstrate and all with equal cogency. That was indeed the great discovery of the great Kant who described it as the antinomies of Reason. Reason finds it infinitely exhilarating to pirouette ad infinitum, i.e., beating about the bush without caring to look for the fact or reality hidden in the bush.
Is it then to say that this faculty is a falsehood and that it can lead you only to falsehood? Not necessarily. It becomes a falsehood when you try to live according to it, according to an idea or ideas it has taken a fancy to; for then it is bound to land you in contradictions. Otherwise, if it is not a question of practical application, if it is merely a play or playfulness in the mental world, it is harmless acrobatics; and even in its own way it can be of some use in making your brain sharp, alert, strong and supple.
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The speeding aeons justifying God.
What were earth's ages if the grey restraint
1.007 - Initial Steps in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Even after we succeed in sitting for awhile in a particular posture, the mind will refuse, after a time, to continue the practice. We will not find anyone in this world as clever as the mind very clever in everything. It will look quite all right for some time and the path will appear rosy, but after awhile there will be resentment of the mind even to sit, and it will produce excuses. There will be rationality behind our inability to practise, and we know very well that rationality is the highest thing that can justify anything. When there is reason brought forth in a very judicious manner, justifying our inability to sit for some time and the worthlessness of the practice itself, then there is no argument against it. The greatest danger is rationality, when it is used as a weapon against what is good for us. It is a double-edged sword it can cut us this way and can cut us that way also such is reason. Reason can justify what is good for us, and it can also justify what is dangerous or what is not good for us. Many sadhakas justify themselves in a wrong way altogether, by bringing about reasons which try to point out that the way of life they are living is quite inevitable and unavoidable. "If it is unavoidable, what can I do?" This is what the sadhaka will say. But it would not be unavoidable if proper precautions had been taken. We make initial mistakes without proper thought, and then these small mistakes look very big and, like a mountain, they stand before us. Later on I shall have occasion to refer to the mistakes we generally commit initially, without proper understanding.
We have a wrong notion about everything, including our own self. And with this wrong notion we go headlong into such a serious practice as is meditation because, just as a small sand particle getting stuck in the eye causes us annoyance, so too a little mistake in the beginning will loom large and become a serious obstacle in the end a factor which can be studied from the history of institutions and the lives of saints, sages and sadhakas. These small mistakes look like normal things, and not serious obstacles, because they do not stand against us. They appear to be unconcerned externals; but there is no such thing as an unconcerned external. Every external is connected with us, and the very fact of our perception of it will be enough reason why it can take action, for or against us, one day or the other.
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
the present, but of the past and the future? What could possibly justify the threat of total destruction?
Bereft of solutions, I had at least been granted the gift of a problem.
1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
If I speak in the spirit of this time, 5 I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. 6 The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me [HI i(v)] nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations.
The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
in the text and justifying the interpretation both of separate
15 1.164.46.
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work meant to justify a hypothesis; the object of this publication
is only to present them in a permanent form for disciples and
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
our experience has meaning as if our activities have transcendent value but we are unable to justify this
belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with
--
although we can no longer justify our actions. Our behavior is shaped (at least in the ideal) by the same
mythic rules thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet that guided our ancestors, for the thousands of
1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
event can justify.
The correlative to any feeling of fear is the desire
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Those who vainly reason without understanding the truth are lost in the jungle of the Vijnanas (the various forms of relative knowledge), running about here and there and trying to justify their view of ego-substance.
The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb), which is not the realm of those given over to mere reasoning
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Here it may be remarked that the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unification under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. But excessive privilege and power are standing temptations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty; oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive knowledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another.
Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence.
1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place.
1.025 - Sadhana - Intensifying a Lighted Flame, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The animalistic way of thinking persists in the human level also, and often many times, in fact the urge to assert one's bodily individuality vehemently gains the upper hand, though rationally it would not be possible for anyone to justify the exclusive reality of a bodily personality. Such was the primitive condition of people in prehistoric times, or Paleolithic times, as they say, when human beings were not yet evolved to the present condition of social understanding. In the biological history of mankind, right from creation as far as the mind can go, it is said that the evolution of the human individual, right from the lowest levels, included certain conditions of human existence which were inseparable from animal life. The caveman, the Neanderthal man and such other primitive types of existence point to an animal mind operating through a human body, where cannibalism was not unfamiliar. One could eat another, because the animal mind was not completely absent even in the human body, and there was insecurity on account of it being possible for one man to eat another man. As history tells us, it took ages for the primitive mind to realise the necessity for individuals to come into agreement among themselves for the purpose of security. If I start jumping upon you and you start jumping upon me, both of us will be unhappy and insecure, and you would not know whether you will be safe and I cannot know if I will be safe. This sort of thing would be most undesirable.
It is said by anthropologists, historian's of mankind's evolution, and political historians, that a state was reached when it was felt necessary to organise people into groups, and this was the beginning of the governmental system. A government is nothing but an agreement among people in order that there may not be warfare among individuals and attacks every day. Otherwise there would be chaos and confusion, and anyone could attack at any moment, for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, an agreement was made, an organisation was set up, a rule was framed and a system was brought forth under which it was obligatory on the part of individuals to obey certain principles laid down by groups, of which some people were made leaders. It does not mean that these leaders were kings or autocrats; they were the governors of law, the dispensers of justice, and the instruments for the maintenance of order in the group of people who found it necessary to bring about this system.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
conquest of universal sovereignty justify, on the one hand, the exalted position of the last conquering
god and, on the other hand, explain the present structure of the world and the actual condition of
1.02 - Meditating on Tara, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
our denitions. Then we justify, Its not just my denition of whos good
and kind. This is everybodys denition of who is worthwhile. Im looking at
1.02 - The 7 Habits An Overview, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness, and spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day.
And what about a parent's relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work -- the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It's easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it -- right now! You're bigger, you're smarter, and you're right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way.
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped reign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self-regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low, while the old functions which might have justified at one time such a distribution of status are either not performed at all or badly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a part of caste pride. He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of authority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the comm and of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply, But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and not superstition and falsehood? When did God comm and it, or how do I know that this was the sense of His comm and and not your error or invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experience of reality? And if it does not, the revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other, because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.
But by what individual faculty or standard shall the innovator find out his new foundation or establish his new measures? Evidently, it will depend upon the available enlightenment of the time and the possible forms of knowledge to which he has access. At first it was in religion a personal illumination supported in the West by a theological, in the East by a philosophical reasoning. In society and politics it started with a crude primitive perception of natural right and justice which took its origin from the exasperation of suffering or from an awakened sense of general oppression, wrong, injustice and the indefensibility of the existing order when brought to any other test than that of privilege and established convention. The religious motive led at first; the social and political, moderating itself after the swift suppression of its first crude and vehement movements, took advantage of the upheaval of religious reformation, followed behind it as a useful ally and waited its time to assume the lead when the spiritual momentum had been spent and, perhaps by the very force of the secular influences it called to its aid, had missed its way. The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured by the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to withhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by moral authority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation of Sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment and imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others. In the East such a movement divorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social significance would have produced simply a series of religious reformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice; in the West atheism and secularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the priesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of Papal authority for the authority of the Scripture, it could not fail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all supernaturalism, religious belief or suprarational truth no less than outward creed and institute.
1.037 - Preventing the Fall in Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Vydhi styna saaya pramda (I.30) Pramada is the other obstacle in the sutra that is mentioned by Patanjali. Blunder, floundering and gross error are called pramada. What can be a greater blunder than to forget the existence of God and our purpose in life? Most of the students do not go beyond this stage; they end with this. Their life closes with this difficulty. They make a serious blunder in choosing a different line of activity altogether. For example, suddenly there can be an emotion fired up within to save the world from falling into to hell. They will think that, "We have come to a stage now where we have to lift the world from perdition." There will be arguments after arguments, logically deduced, justifying this attitude, because logic also comes from the mind it does not come from outside. The aspiration of the spirit for God-realisation will be dubbed as selfishness of the worst type. Even today we have thousands of people before us who have such suspicions in their minds. These suspicions do not arise merely in idiotic minds, but they also arise in minds of those who are very intelligent, very learned, very honest and sincere in their approach. Such people will have doubts of this type, and come to think that working for the liberation of others is better than working for the liberation of one's own self, because one's own self is a selfish centre. The thinking is: "This is very clear everybody knows that, and it does not require very much argument to prove that a single person's salvation is selfish compared to the salvation of many others."
So we give up the aspiration for the salvation of the soul, and work for the salvation of others. The result is that both will be in equal bondage, and neither will we get salvation, nor will the other. This will not be understood by the mind. It is a trick that is played, because there is no such thing as a salvation of the type that people are arguing for in this manner. It is a gross error of thinking; it is a blunder of the first water. But this pramada or mistake will be committed by most people, and even advanced seekers will not be free from this mistake.
Even masters, great Mahatmas and Mandaleshwars are not exempt from this error of thought, because it is a very subtle form of difficulty which is easy to justify by specious logic, and it may look very wonderful and beautiful to the public eye, though it may be a gross mistake. This pramada is death itself. Nothing can be worse than this idiocy in the practice of yoga. A student of yoga is free from this blunder. This pramada is the worst thing that we can expect on the path. So, one should not be heedless or careless in the evaluation of one's spiritual way of living. Let there be persistent practice with caution, intelligence and understanding that we are moving in the same direction that we have chosen earlier, and we have not taken a different line of approach.
After that, something else can come, says Patanjali. This working for the world and merging oneself in social liberating activity cannot go on for a long time, because the world will give us a kick. All great saviours of mankind were thrown to the pits because they could not save mankind. A day comes when society will dislike and even hate us, though we are utmost sincere in trying to help it. We have only to read history that is sufficient. All masters in the political field and most sincere workers in the social field were finally doomed by society. They were either killed by the very same people for whom they were working, or they were condemned to a condition worse than death. This is what happened to great leaders of mankind right from Pedicles, Plato and Aristotle, and nobody has been exempted from this, right up to modern times which is the tragedy of human effort. Then we will realise what is in front of us. People generally leave this world with a sob and a cry, not with joy on their faces, because they realised this fact too late. There was very little time for them to live in this world, and all the time had been spent in wrong activity under the impression that it is right activity.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
and justify the Christian god in every accident all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesom, and
antirational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to
1.03 - BOOK THE THIRD, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And first th' unerring prophet justify'd.
This nymph the God Cephisus had abus'd,
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: In Europe they have always tried for democracy. Real democracy has always failed, and failed because it is against human nature. There are certain men who are bound to govern. One must be prepared to face facts. Even in the democracies those men manage to rule, and one knows only too well the villagers do not. Only, those people govern in their name, and it sometimes makes them more free and reckless. In Russia one does not know the exact situation the attempt was for creating real rule of the people, i.e. of the village. You see in what it has ended? It has established again an oligarchy of the Lenin-party. One may even ask: What has Russia created? It has tried to destroy capital and thus tried to destroy and perhaps succeeded in destroying city life. It is trying mechanically to equalise men. But it is not a success. The Western social life rests on interests and rights. It depends upon the vitalistic existence of man which is largely governed by his rational mind helped by scientific inventions. Reason gives man the rigid methods of classification and mental construction and theory to justify his interests and rights, and science gives him the required efficiency, force and power. Thus he is sure of his goal. But one may say that, though organised and effective, European life is not organic. The view that it takes of man is a very imperfect view, and the ideal it sets before man an incomplete ideal. That is why you find there class-war and struggle for rights governed by the rational intellect. European life is very powerful because it can put the whole force of its life at once in operation by a coordination of all its members. In old times the ideal was different. They the ancients based their society on the structure of religion. I do not mean narrow religion but the highest law of our being. The whole social fabric was built up to fulfil that purpose. There was no talk in those days of individual liberty in the present sense of the term. But there was absolute communal liberty. Every community was completely free to develop its own Dharma, the law of its being. Even the selection of the line was a matter of free choice for the individual.
I do not believe that because a man is governed by another man, or one class by another class, there is always oppression; for instance, the Brahmins never ruled but they were never oppressed by others, rather they oppressed other people. The government becomes useless and bad when one class or one nation keeps another down and governs it for its own benefit and does not allow the class or nation to follow its own Dharma.
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P. T.: I am not in favour of that programme, because it will lead in the end to lust for power and then personal differences and jealousies would also creep in. We cannot, in that case, justify the high hopes which people have about our work.
Lajpat Rai: They expect you to usher in the golden age.
1.03 - Tara, Liberator from the Eight Dangers, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
whatever means possible to justify bombing a country whose government
one considers dangerous.
1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is this principle and necessity that justify an age of individualism and rationalism and make it, however short it may be, an inevitable period in the cycle. A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress. In India, since the great Buddhistic upheaval of the national thought and life, there has been a series of re current attempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life and get behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have been conducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soul-intuition and deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant and destructive. Although productive of great internal and considerable external changes, they have never succeeded in getting rid of the predominant conventional order. The work of a dissolvent and destructive intellectual criticism, though not entirely absent from some of these movements, has never gone far enough; the constructive force, insufficiently aided by the destructive, has not been able to make a wide and free space for its new formation. It is only with the period of European influence and impact that circumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce the beginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation of ideas and things have come into existence. The characteristic power of these influences has been throughoutor at any rate till quite recentlyrationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic. It has compelled the national mind to view everything from a new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the present or restore the past are obliged un consciously or half-consciously to justify their endeavour from the novel point of view and by its appropriate standards of reasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of life and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of a quite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers.
The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid, defaced or distorted; but from that first step it must proceed to others and in the end to a general questioning of the foundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life and action. A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.
1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
actual language of the epic does not justify and, if pressed, would turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. The language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. But there is this much of truth in the view, that the setting of the doctrine though not symbolical, is certainly typical, as indeed the setting of such a discourse as the Gita must necessarily be if it is to have any relation at all with that which it frames. Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representative man of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movement of men and nations; in the Gita he typifies the human soul of action brought face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection.
Arjuna is the fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishna as his charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of the human soul and the divine riding in one chariot through a great battle to the goal of a high-aspiring effort. But there it is a pure figure and symbol. The Divine is there Indra, the Master of the
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The first result is a violent sensational and physical crisis which produces a disgust of the action and its material objects and of life itself. He rejects the vital aim pursued by egoistic humanity in its action, - happiness and enjoyment; he rejects the vital aim of the Kshatriya, victory and rule and power and the government of men. What after all is this fight for justice when reduced to its practical terms, but just this, a fight for the interests of himself, his brothers and his party, for possession and enjoyment and rule? But at such a cost these things are not worth having. For they are of no value in themselves, but only as a means to the right maintenance of social and national life and it is these very aims that in the person of his kin and his race he is about to destroy. And then comes the cry of the emotions. These are they for whose sake life and happiness are desired, our "own people". Who would consent to slay these for the sake of all the earth, or even for the kingdom of the three worlds? What pleasure can there be in life, what happiness, what satisfaction in oneself after such a deed? The whole thing is a dreadful sin, - for now the moral sense awakens to justify the revolt of the sensations and the emotions. It is a sin, there is no right nor justice in mutual slaughter; especially are those who are to be slain the natural objects of reverence and of love, those without whom one would not care to live, and to violate these sacred feelings can be no virtue, can be nothing but a heinous crime. Granted that the offence, the aggression, the first sin, the crimes of greed and selfish passion which have brought things to such a pass came from the other side; yet armed resistance to wrong under such circumstances would be itself a sin and
The Human Disciple
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:And yet the question cannot be solved by logic arguing on the data of our ordinary physical existence; for in those data there is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. We have, normally, neither any definitive experience of a cosmic mind or supermind not bound up with the life of the individual body, nor, on the other hand, any firm limit of experience which would justify us in supposing that our subjective self really depends upon the physical frame and can neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body. Only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be decided.
11:The extension of our consciousness, to be satisfying, must necessarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and senses are dispensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord.
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a divine life for man in the world which will at once justify Science by disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the terrestrial evolution and realise by the transfiguration of the human soul into the divine the great ideal dream of all high religions.
4:But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the ascetic? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnipotence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becomings of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the immutable Being, its consent to this infinite fecundity of its own dynamic Nature.
1.04 - The Core of the Teaching, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thus, there are those who make the Gita teach, not works at all, but a discipline of preparation for renouncing life and works: the indifferent performance of prescribed actions or of whatever task may lie ready to the hands, becomes the means, the discipline; the final renunciation of life and works is the sole real object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from
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Arjuna must do is one from which his moral sense recoils. It is his duty to fight, you say? But that duty has now become to his mind a terrible sin. How does it help him or solve his difficulty, to tell him that he must do his duty disinterestedly, dispassionately? He will want to know which is his duty or how it can be his duty to destroy in a sanguinary massacre his kin, his race and his country. He is told that he has right on his side, but that does not and cannot satisfy him, because his very point is that the justice of his legal claim does not justify him in supporting it by a pitiless massacre destructive to the future of his nation. Is he then to act dispassionately in the sense of not caring whether it is a sin or what its consequences may be so long as he does his duty as a soldier? That may be the teaching of a State, of politicians, of lawyers, of ethical casuists; it can never be the teaching of a great religious and philosophical Scripture which sets out to solve the problem of life and action from the
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1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But now we have, very remarkably, very swiftly coming to the surface this new psychological tendency of the communal consciousness. Now first we hear of the soul of a nation and, what is more to the purpose, actually see nations feeling for their souls, trying to find them, seriously endeavouring to act from the new sense and make it consciously operative in the common life and action. It is only natural that this tendency should have been, for the most part, most powerful in new nations or in those struggling to realise themselves in spite of political subjection or defeat. For these need more to feel the difference between themselves and others so that they may assert and justify their individuality as against the powerful superlife which tends to absorb or efface it. And precisely because their objective life is feeble and it is difficult to affirm it by its own strength in the adverse circumstances, there is more chance of their seeking for their individuality and its force of self-assertion in that which is subjective and psychological or at least in that which has a subjective or a psychological significance.
Therefore in nations so circumstanced this tendency of self-finding has been most powerful and has even created in some of them a new type of national movement, as in Ireland and India. This and no other was the root-meaning of Swadeshism in Bengal and of the Irish movement in its earlier less purely political stages. The emergence of Bengal as a sub-nation in India was throughout a strongly subjective movement and in its later development it became very consciously that. The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves. We must not forget, however, that in the first stages these movements followed in their superficial thought the old motives of an objective and mostly political self-consciousness. The East indeed is always more subjective than the West and we can see the subjective tinge even in its political movements whether in Persia, India or China, and even in the very imitative movement of the Japanese resurgence. But it is only recently that this subjectivism has become self-conscious. We may therefore conclude that the conscious and deliberate subjectivism of certain nations was only the sign and precursor of a general change in humanity and has been helped forward by local circumstances, but was not really dependent upon them or in any sense their product.
--- Overview of verb justify
The verb justify has 5 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
1. (17) justify, warrant ::: (show to be reasonable or provide adequate ground for; "The emergency does not warrant all of us buying guns"; "The end justifies the means")
2. (9) justify, vindicate ::: (show to be right by providing justification or proof; "vindicate a claim")
3. (2) apologize, apologise, excuse, justify, rationalize, rationalise ::: (defend, explain, clear away, or make excuses for by reasoning; "rationalize the child's seemingly crazy behavior"; "he rationalized his lack of success")
4. absolve, justify, free ::: (let off the hook; "I absolve you from this responsibility")
5. justify ::: (adjust the spaces between words; "justify the margins")
Wikipedia - Cause of action -- Set of facts sufficient to justify a right to sue
Wikipedia - Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) -- A thought experiment, to justify Bayesian probability
Wikipedia - Good Old Cause -- Rationale made by the New Model Army soldiers to justify their fighting on behalf of Parliament
Wikipedia - Justify (horse) -- American Thoroughbred racehorse
Wikipedia - Justify My Love -- 1990 single by Madonna
Wikipedia - Premise -- Statement that an argument claims will induce or justify a conclusion
Wikipedia - Scientific racism -- Misuse of the scientific method to justify racism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44180534-how-to-justify-torture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6441762-justifying-the-margins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8556595-justify-my-thug
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9152376-how-germany-seeks-to-justify-her-atrocities
selforum - sri aurobindo is invoked to justify
selforum - machines can justify their own
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/JustifyingEdit
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Justify
Prisoner Of Honor(1991) - "Prisoner of Honor" documents the French Dreyfus Affair that saw a French Captain sent to Devils' Island for espionage near the end of the nineteenth century. Richard Dreyfuss plays Colonel Picquart who is given the job of justifying Dreyfus' sentence. Instead, he discovers that Dreyfus, a Jew, was...
https://education.fandom.com/wiki/Advice_of_ways_to_stop_justifying
Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 2 -- -- Production I.G -- 4 eps -- Novel -- Action Drama Military Sci-Fi Space -- Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 2 Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu: Die Neue These - Seiran 2 -- Marquis Reinhard von Lohengramm's plot to destabilize the Free Planets Alliance succeeds when the treacherous former Rear Admiral Arthur Lynch instigates a coup on Heinessen. Equipped with a plan crafted by Reinhard himself, Lynch encourages his longtime friend Admiral Dwight Greenhill to supervise the National Salvation Military Council's toppling of the civilian government. Seeking to defend democracy and restore the Alliance constitution, Admiral Yang Wen-li faces off against his fellow citizens—and, regrettably, the father of his devoted adjutant Lieutenant Frederica Greenhill. -- -- Now with the Free Planets Alliance thoroughly occupied with their own internal matters, the forces of the Galactic Empire can safely suppress the newly formed Lippstadt League led by Duke Otto von Braunschweig. However, with his friend and loyal subordinate High Admiral Siegfried Kircheis fighting far away in the noble-controlled frontier regions, Reinhard increasingly relies on the advice of the ruthless Vice Admiral Paul von Oberstein, whose influence within the esteemed Lohengramm admiralty steadily grows. -- -- Though bloodshed is inevitable on both sides of the galaxy, Yang Wen-li of the Alliance and Reinhard von Lohengramm of the Empire each ask themselves the same questions: how will history look back on their actions? Will the ends justify the means? -- -- Movie - Oct 25, 2019 -- 15,432 8.09
Justify
Justify (horse)
Justifying Belief
Justifying Genocide
Justify My Love
Justify (The Rasmus song)
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