Quotes About Justification

I]n the work of the New Left one finds philosophical justification for what are now intuitive commonplaces of our culture: to be free is to be sexually liberated; to be happy is to be affirmed in that liberation.

All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one's own way of life. . . . To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.

Luther's doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.

It is as though the way to create a child's acceptance of animals' deaths is by convincing him or her that sometimes humans must be killed too. "Just" wars justify meat eating.

I don't know if anybody thinks of themselves as bad. We all have excuses.

In the previous chapter, we saw on a smaller scale how divorcing couples typically justify the hurt they inflict on each other. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, because our victims deserved what they got, we hate them even more than we did before we harmed them, which in turn makes us inflict even more pain on them.

When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.

People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It's much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.

Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, 'He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,' were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

No matter how painful it is to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.

It wasn't my fault that Candace followed me down to the water's edge and it wasn't my fault that I picked her up and held her down in the water and watched her pass on to the great beyond. She wanted to be there, or she wouldn't have gone down there with me. She knew she was killing me and she knew that I was not the type to go down without a fight.

There isn't a definite right and wrong anyway. Sometimes we do what seems wrong, but we have good reasons for doing it, so it's not wrong after all.

Don't you see? We've become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, 'I'm angry at him and I didn't express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it's depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.' It's like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we're allowed to do stupid things.

By their peculiar "reasoning," too, theologians have sanctioned most of the ills of the ages. They justified the Inquisition, serfdom, and slavery. Theologians of our time defend segregation and the annihilation of one race by the other. They have drifted away from righteousness into an effort to make wrong seem to be right.

The differentness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess. It is by the development of these gifts that every race must justify its right to exist.

So it was that I justified my morals and ethics. Everything became relative.

We are blind to the fact that what we do to them deprives them of their rights; we do not want to see this because we profit from it, and so we make use of what are really morally irrelevant differences between them and ourselves to justify the difference in treatment.

Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action.

Some rumors simultaneously relieve "a primary emotional urge" and offer an explanation, to those who accept them, of why they feel as they do; the rumor "rationalizes while it relieves.