Quotes About Justifications

Integrity doesn't stop men from killing, Brightness," Sebarial said. "It just makes them use different justifications.

With respect to the legal justifications or the policies relating to the treatment of detainees, I was not aware of any issues on that or the legal memos that subsequently came out until the summer, sometime in 2004, when there started to be news reports on that.

Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks - all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.

Why did the killer stalk the sorority girls in Black Christmas? Why was Regan possessed in The Exorcist? Why was the shark cruising around Amity? Where did Carrie White's powers come from? There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life's randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

if I had been raised in a critical or demanding environment, it might have been easier for me, relatively speaking, to find refuge in worse-than or need-to-be-seen-as justifications. Those who were raised in affluent or sanctimonious environments, on the other hand, may naturally gravitate to better-than and I-deserve justifications, and so on. Need-to-be-seen-as boxes might easily arise in such circumstances as well.

When we're trying to form and keep habits, we often search - even unconsciously - for loopholes. We look for justifications that will excuse us from keeping this particular habit in this particular situation.

The language of Consumer is most colorful. At last count, this language possesses twenty-nine thousand four hundred fifty six words and phrases to replace and deflect the immoral concept of 'greed'. It possesses Four Volumes of Rationalizations, Nine Volumes of Justifications and a Handy Quick-Chart of Suitable False Definitions of the concept of 'need', an essential resource to be used at the Moment of Indecision in Conjunction with Mouth- Watering Pupil- Dilating Desire.

The missiles come first, and the justifications come second.

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

That" thing Christie and Priebus so desperately needed was their little fix. Getting calls. Feeling important. Remaining relevant. Being In The Mix. Once you've already determined that "that" is the objective, the justifications only need to match the desired outcome. And so Little Mixes like Christie and Priebus find themselves wrapped in a pretzel of their own rationalizations.

Pretexts are not wanting when one wishes to use them.

But, for better or worse, the human mind is more complex than the brain of a rat or a puppy. A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think—and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrates, our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

Already, boar are being killed here by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could wipe them out. Among the commission's justifications is that they cause 'substantial damage' to woodlands.17 What does this mean? The notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.

There are occasions and causes, why and wherefore in all things.

I overlooked some obvious problems, made excuses for others.

Orwell was interested above all not in the rationalizations of the dominant, but in the excuses and whimperings of the submissive.

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

It is this notion of women's barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.

Justifications, most of them, which are like certain rocks just below the surface of the water. You can lean on them, you can grab hold of them, but you can also hit them and hurt yourself very badly.

One hundred percent of the time there is a good reason and a real reason for everything.

People have their reasons for the damnedest things in my experience.

But the first casualty of the Afghanistan War wasn't truth. That had long before succumbed to the onslaught of Soviet lies about all aspects of life. The all-encompassing brainwashing makes the task of discerning what actually took place in Afghanistan especially difficult. The manufactured justifications that enabled many to close their eyes to the war's unspeakable abuses continue to influence perceptions-although the Soviets had no monopoly in that.

The cowardice that keeps silent in the face of the sufferings of the poor and that offers any number of adroit justifications represents an especially serious failure of Latin American Christians.

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since... I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.