Justify Quotes - Page 4

• The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Lying, Law, Way

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• I don't know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

  Gary Vaynerchuk

  Leaving, Engagement, Social

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• I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

  Christopher Walken

  Real, Thinking, Interesting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

  Arthur Miller

  Crucible, Principles, May

  Arthur Miller (1992). “The Crucible”, p.106, Heinemann

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• 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

  Hurt, Perfect, Laughing

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• 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

  Independent, Common Sense, Principles

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1859). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence. Reports and opinions while secretary of state”, p.407

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• 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

  Morning, Pain, Believe

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.286, Penguin

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• It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive -- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn't exist, or isn't yours. No, no! They don't even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you're heading and...Someone to soak up all the yearning. That's what I think.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  Love You, Thinking, Arrows

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• 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

  Heart, Men, Broken

  Benjamin Constant, Margaret Mauldon, Patrick Coleman (2001). “Adolphe”, p.79, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Suffering, Doe, Ends

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.33, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Heart, Wish, Church

  Joris-Karl Huysmans (2015). “Against the Grain”, p.68, Booklassic

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• Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.

  Marianne Wiggins

  Eye, Essence, Two

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• 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

  Believe, Practice, Elements

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• 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

  Beautiful, Buddhism, Thinking

  Chronicles of Clovis (1911) "The Match-Maker"

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• The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

  Jose Saramago

  Confused, Reality, People

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• How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

  Margaret Atwood

  Relationship, Sleep, Men

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• 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

  Teacher, Philosophy, Intelligent

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• 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

  Struggle, Might, Desperate

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Running, Children, Thinking

  Alfie Kohn (1999). “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Squares, Doe, Done

  Steve Martin (2001). “Shopgirl”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• 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

  Life, Eye, Men

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• The human heart is greedy; it will use religion, color, or any other excuse to justify its greed. Blame the human heart.

  Bono

  Heart, Color, Greed

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• 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

  People, Intellectual, Want

  Thomas Sowell (2007). “A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles”, p.55, Basic Books

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• Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

  Bill Watterson

  Art, Doe, Asking

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• 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

  Giving, Needs, Want

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.182, Random House

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