Justify Quotes - Page 35

• 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

  People, Want, Natural

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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

  Running, Real, School

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• 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

  Men, Twenties, World

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.69, American Foundation for the Blind

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• In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

  Bill Vaughan

  Book, Reading, Age

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• 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

  Children, Taken, Talking

  The House in Paris pt. 1, ch. 2 (1935)

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• 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

  Order, Silence, May

  Edmund Burke (1912). “Reflections on the French Revolution”, p.9, CUP Archive

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• 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

  Dancing, Gentleman, Excuse

  Richard Griffith, Laurence Sterne (1794). “The Posthumous Works of Laurence Sterne: ...”

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• The primary battle which religion must fight today is the battle to justify its own existence.

  Georgia Harkness

  Fighting, Religion, Battle

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• 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

  Powerful, Believe, Want

  Gwen Bristow (2014). “Tomorrow Is Forever: A Novel”, p.158, Open Road Media

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• I'm not trying to justify myself, or say I'm not sorry, or not contrite.

  Lance Armstrong

  Sorry, Trying, Not Sorry

  Interview with Dan Roan, www.bbc.com. January 26, 2015.

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• My mother's love for me was so great
  I have worked hard to justify it.

  Marc Chagall

  Mother, Mother's Love, Hard

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• 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

  Hippie, Cutting, Reality

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, news.stlpublicradio.org. April 22, 2014.

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• 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

  Jesus, Believe, Hands

  Source: www.dove.org

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• 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

  Christian, Caring, People

  Source: theislamicmonthly.com

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• People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith.

  Desmond Tutu

  People, Able, Cruelty

  Source: theislamicmonthly.com

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• 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

  Book, Reading, Media

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• 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

  Animal, Intellectual, Reason

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Betrayal, Philosophy, War

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Mean, Thinking, Goal

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• 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

  Religious, Intelligent, Competition

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1209, Delphi Classics

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• I don't care whether it was once sacred or not, I HATE WHAT I DO. It's destroying my soul, making me lose touch with myself, teaching me that pain is a reward, that money buys everything and justifies everything.

  Paulo Coelho

  Pain, Hate, Teaching

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• 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

  Art, Patriotic, Exercise

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• Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, 'It's business.' That is, 'it's business' has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.

  Ida Tarbell

  Business, People, Special

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• 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

  Responsibility, Power, Framework

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• No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Opportunity, Evil, Justice

  Whitney v. California (concurring opinion) (1927) See OliverWendell Holmes, Jr. 29

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