Quotes About Justification

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

If trustees feel it is in their charity's interest to pay high salaries to attract talented people, then they should have the courage of their conviction and explain their decisions publicly.

I don't know what's more embarrassing, these musicians and actors talking about politics in interviews or the media actually giving them credibility about it. It's absurd that a celebrity could speak out on the economy or politics with no more justification than a hit album or a movie.

I started to model because I thought I could use it as an excuse to others, like, 'Yeah, I'm tall because I'm a model.'

Watch, for example, how much of our speech is aimed at justifying our actions. We find it almost impossible to act and allow the act to speak for itself.

How will you do it?" says Sinclair. "I'll know when I see the setup, but I imagine I'll basically just kill them all and take their stuff. Is that okay with everyone?" Sandoval says, "It's fine with me." "Me too," says Sinclair. Howard just grunts.

You killed Buzzy." "Yeah. I'm sorry." "Don't be sorry. I'm glad you did it.

We do not always believe things because they're true. More often than not, we believe things because they're expedient.

For poetry, like life, is its own justification

There was no path to victory when you couldn't attack into the heart of enemy territory for fear of collateral damage. Collateral damage! God help you if you killed some civilians, even if those were the very people supporting and enabling our enemies. Had that philosophy held sway in World War II, every American would now be speaking Japanese or German.

compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral and have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders.

I couldn't help it," I said, knowing how lame that sounded. It was as bad as Angeline's "it's not my fault" mantra.

You never do anything without a reason." "Of course not. Why do anything without a reason?" "Don't start up with your circular logic.

Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A

The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.

answered his telephone himself if he happened to be at hand when it signalled because each call offered good odds that he would be justified in being gratifyingly rude to some stranger for daring to invade his privacy without cause—"cause" by Harshaw's definition, not by the stranger's.

the human mind's ability to rationalize its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited

Any conversation with Smith turned up at least one bit of human behavior which could not be justified logically, at least in terms that Smith could understand, and attempts to do so were endlessly time-consuming.

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

The belief that the human umwelt reveals reality or deep reality seems, in this perspective, as naive as the notion that a yardstick shows more reality than a voltmeter, or that my religion 'is' better than your religion. Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms.