Quotes About Justification

Reputable scholars might have denied its authenticity, but there are always other scholars who disagree--and people will believe what they want to believe, never mind the evidence. If there is anything life has taught me, it is that there is no idea so absurd that someone will not accept it as truth, and no action so bizarre that it will not be justified in the eyes of a true believer.

Claims such as I'm not a racist or so-and-so is not a racist may sound harmless to some, but to many they cut deep. Familiar denials like these so often seem to be the justification for a second, unspoken part to that sentence: and therefore I don't have to do anything about racism. And that's the part that is just plain wrong.

Many commentators argue that the justification of hostility and discrimination on grounds of culture rather than race is mostly a rhetorical ploy to get around the taboo against racism that has gradually been established, especially in Western liberal democracies. There is, they contend, a new 'cultural racism' that has increasingly supplanted an older biological racism. 'Islamophobia' has been identified as one of the most recent forms of this new racism.

I want to know the thing that will justify my time, all the time I've spent doing shit jobs. Stupid work.

Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt.

The regime established here [in the U.S.] promised untrammeled freedom to reasonnot to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion.

bad things for good reasons

De jure objections are arguments of claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.

Argument is not needed for rational justification. The believer is entirely within his epistemic right in believing, for example, that God has created the world, even if he has no argument at all for that conclusion..

If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God.

God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so.

There seem to be two strands to this notion of justification. On the one hand, justification seems to have something to do with evidence: a belief (or the believer) is unjustified if there isn't any evidence, or enough evidence, for that belief. On the other hand, justification seems to have something to do with duty, or obligation, or moral rightness.

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples.

If you have evidence for every proposition you believe, then you will believe infinitely many propositions. So presumably some propositions can properly be believed and accepted without evidence. Well, why not belief in God? Why is it not entirely acceptable, desirable, right, proper, and rational to accept belief in God without any argument or evidence?

Cada cual tiene su moral. Juzgo los actos con la vara de medir del placer que proporcionan. El éxtasis voluptuoso es la suprema meta de la existencia, y no necesita justificación alguna. Pero, sin placer, el crimen es un mal gratuito, un sórdido daño. Resulta indefendible.

If it be said that the consent of the strongest party in a nation, is all that is necessary to justify the establishment of a government that shall have authority over the weaker party, it may be answered that the most despotic governments in the world rest upon that very principle, viz.: the consent of the strongest party.

If the U.S. and its allies can invade a weaker country on the excuse it is abetting terrorism, then why should not India, say, launch a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan on the self-same grounds?

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

There is no possible justification or excuse for marketing dangerous weapons to children as if they were toys.

There's no way you can possibly intellectually justify, 'Well, it's okay for the Western Judeo-Christian countries to have nuclear weapons, but not for a country like Iran.' That logic goes nowhere fast.

Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position.

And we've got a toaster and everything. So there is no reason for the wedding.