Justify Quotes - Page 22

• 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

  Beautiful, Love Life, People

  "Poet of the Arab world" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. June 7, 2002.

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• Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully
  as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

  Sylvia Plath

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.23, Anchor

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• 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

  Heart, Mean, Compassion

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• I think in general the ends do not justify the means.

  Howard Dean

  Mean, Thinking, Ends

  "Dean's 'Urban Legend'". www.nytimes.com. October 13, 2003.

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• When a man is afraid and accedes to fear, he will always find arguments to justify his own surrender.

  Natan Sharansky

  Fear, Men, Surrender

  Natan Sharansky (1998). “Fear No Evil”, p.292, PublicAffairs

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• Legislators in Kansas, Arizona and 23 other states who are properly determined to protect religious freedom can begin by asking themselves: Does any religious conviction justify denying lesbians and gays a basic legal promise of non-discrimination in hiring, public accommodations, and housing? Surely the answer to this question is no. Correcting that inequity would begin the process of recognizing that both sides - gay couples and religious objectors - have rights and that reasonable accommodation is possible only when both sides have something to gain.

  David Blankenhorn

  Religious, Couple, Gay

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• 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

  Art, Mean, Museums

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• 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

  Children, Abortion, Understanding

  "Ronald Reagan".

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• 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
  such a place?

  Charles Lindbergh

  Men, Life And Death, Progress

  "Lindbergh Said to Regret Misperceptions Over Jews" by Herber Mitgang, archive.nytimes.com. April 20, 1980.

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• 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

  World, Argument, Explanation

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• 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

  Light, Darkness, Enemy

  Emily St. John Mandel (2014). “Station Eleven: A novel”, p.141, Vintage

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• The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other; and to that extent, I can accept myself.

  James Nachtwey

  Ambition, Compassion, Ideas

  "War Photographer". Documentary, www.imdb.com. 2001.

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• 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

  Responsibility, Bourgeoisie, Behaviour

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2012). “An Interpretation of Christian Ethics”, p.81, Westminster John Knox Press

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• What amazes me is how far some people will go to justify their behavior to themselves, just to preserve that self-perception.

  Christopher Golden

  Self, People, Perception

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• 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

  People, Understanding, Feelings

  Peter Singer (2010). “The Life You Can Save: How to play your part in ending world poverty”, p.61, Pan Macmillan

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• [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

  Thinking, Views, Investing

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• 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

  Country, Peace, War

  Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

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• 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

  War, Worry, Cold

  Ronald Reagan (2009). “The Reagan Diaries”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

  Paul Valery

  Giving, Example, Want

  Regards sur le Monde Actuel (1931)

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• 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

  Turns, Prettiness, Maxims

  Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield (1855). “The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc : to which is Prefixed, an Original Life of the Author”, p.498

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• In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

  Albert Camus

  Dream, Children, Errors

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.188, Vintage

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• 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

  Mother, Attachment, Giving

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• 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

  Kindness, Men, Opinion

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• 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

  Jigsaw Puzzles, Effort, Pieces

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• 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

  Character, America, People

  Don DeLillo (2012). “The Names”, p.114, Vintage

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