Justification Quotes - Page 20

• It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Killing, Difficult

  Karen Armstrong (2006). “The great transformation: the beginning of our religious traditions”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• Passionate attachment to another nation produces a variety of evils... the illusion of common interests where no real common interests exist; adopting the enmities of the other; and participation in the quarrels and wars of the other without any justification. Still another evil is that such a passionate attachment gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country.

  George Washington

  Country, Real, War

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• The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation.

  Robert McNamara

  Past, Goal, Balance

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• Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification. The elimination of force at all costs in Utopian.

  Bhagat Singh

  Cost, Violence, Causes

  Bhagat Singh (1986). “Selected writings of Shaheed Bhagat Singh”

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• The intelligence services would probably be in a better position to make an assessment of the advancement of the Iranian nuclear program than Podhoretz or Ledeen. They don't have access to any specific information. So for them to dismiss it has no great value because they have no authority whatsoever on this issue. For them to push forward with their efforts to get a war started between the U.S. and Iran, you certainly cannot say that Iran does not have a nuclear program. If you say that, then the justification for war has basically been eliminated.

  Trita Parsi

  War, Intelligence Services, Issues

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It is one thing to believe in justification by faith, it is another thing to be justified by faith.

  Adolph Saphir

  Believe, Justified, One Thing

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• As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies.

  Albert Einstein

  Lying, Data, Numbers

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• The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

  Paul Theroux

  Self, Vanishing, Improvement

  Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Our understanding of early Christian beginnings is usually monolithic. It is much determined by the Acts of the Apostles, which pictures a straightforward development from the primitive community in Jerusalem founded on Pentecost to the world-wide mission of Paul climaxing with his arrival in Rome, the political centre of the Greco-Roman world. The Pauline epistles are understood not so much as historical sources reflecting a much more multifaceted early Christian situation fraught with tensions but as theological treatises expounding and defending the doctrine of justification by faith.

  Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

  Christian, Rome, Community

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• Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

  George Santayana

  Effort, Mind, Age

  George Santayana (1932). “The Life of Reason”, p.74, Library of Alexandria

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• Many Christians in the evangelical tradition use words like "conversion," "regeneration," "justification," "born-again," etc. all as more or less synonyms to mean "becoming a Christian from cold." In the classic Reformed tradition, the word "justification" is much more fine-tuned than that and has to do with a verdict which is pronounced, rather than with something happening to you in terms of actually being born again. So that I'm actually much closer to some classic Reformed writing on this than some people perhaps realize.

  N. T. Wright

  Christian, Mean, Writing

  Interview with Trevin Wax, blogs.thegospelcoalition.org. November 19, 2007.

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• For Paul 'righteousness' and 'justice' are the same word, as they were in Hebrew. Paul clearly believes that helping the poor is a central and ongoing part of Christian commitment, precisely because in Jesus Christ God has unveiled and launched his plan for the rescue, redemption and renewal of the whole creation. Justification and justice go very closely together.

  N. T. Wright

  Christian, Jesus, Believe

  Source: kenwytsma.com

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• The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Zest, Connections, Uniting

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Looking Down, Picks

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• The only justification of rebellion is success.

  Thomas Reed

  Rebellion

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• Without just cause of reason, without legal or moral justification, and without a thread of proof that Iraq directly threatens the security of the United States, the Bush administration has headed to war.

  Zack de la Rocha

  War, Iraq, United States

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• First of all, I had the desire for that format [silent movie], and then when I was talking to people, I felt that people needed justification. Why are you doing a silent movie? Is it just for your own pleasure? I felt it was not enough for them so I realized I have to choose the subject that will make things easier for them and to tell the story of a silent actor makes sense for doing a silent movie.

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Talking, People, Desire

  "Director Michel Hazanavicius the Artist Interview". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 26, 2011.

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• Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government.

  Wesley Pruden

  Government, Land, Newspapers

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• The only justifications for belief have the form "justified for me".

  Ken Wilber

  Belief, Justified, Form

  Ken Wilber (2003). “Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free!”, p.34, Shambhala Publications

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• Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Philosophical, Emotional, Mind

  Robert Anton Wilson (1987). “The new inquisition: irrational rationalism and the citadel of science”

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• Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

  Thomas Nagel

  Taken, Mean, Reality

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• The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction.

  Luc Delahaye

  Photography, Religious, Suffering

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• Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others. Everyone's sense of virtue is degraded by the present reality. A revolutionary principle is embedded in the global economic system, awaiting broader recognition: Human dignity is indivisible. Across the distances of culture and nations, across vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, even the least among us are entitled to dignity, and no justification exists or brutalizing them in the pursuit of commerce.

  William Greider

  Distance, Reality, Principles

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• However good we are, however correctly we seek to lead our lives, tragedies do occur. We can blame others, look for justification, imagine how our lives would have been different without them. But none of that matters: they have happened, and that is that. From this point on, it is necessary that we review our own lives, overcome fear, and begin the process of reconstruction.

  Paulo Coelho

  Tragedy, Overcoming, Different

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• Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

  George Washington

  Real, War, Enmity

  George Washington (2008). “George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior: ...And Other Important Writings”, p.175, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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