Quotes & Sayings About Not Being Justified

If other people do not understand our behavior - so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself - to his reason and his conscience - and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation. — Erich Fromm

I was stuck in the feeling that one did not
was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am. — John Lennon

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. — Robert A. Heinlein

May we all thus experience what it is to be not almost only, but altogether Christians! Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus, knowing we have peace with God through Jesus Christ, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God, and having the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the l holy Ghost given unto us! — John Wesley

Tyrants are willing to commit to anything ... including mass murder to maintain their domination over every human being alive. They abuse the lives of the people they are entrusted with by the perverse dictates that they, themselves, would never live by. And they feel justified in this by their own self-righteous elite morality, which sets them high above everyone else in their own minds.
You and I, however, are made of quite different stuff. Our words are filled with our true beliefs and backed by the honesty of our actions. We take great pride in not only who we are ... but overcoming the struggle it took to make us this way. We are men and women of character ... principles ... and courage! — R.G. Risch

ROM5.9 Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. ROM5.10 For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. ROM5.11 And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement. ROM5.12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: ROM5.13 (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. — Anonymous

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause
and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative. — Joseph Sobran

I justified my decision to take the bus by the fact that hippies had never spent much time in Malaysia either. To put it bluntly, they weren't welcome. An official government regulation at the time banned hippies from staying in the country. It read: If you are dressed in shabby, dirty, or indecent clothes, living in temporary or makeshift shelters you will be deemed a hippie. On being deemed a hippie, your visit pass will be cancelled and you will be ordered to leave Malaysia within 24 hours, failing which you will be prosecuted under immigration laws. Furthermore, you will not be permitted to enter Malaysian again. — Peter Moore

I wondered
not for the first time
whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted? — Nelson Mandela

The being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly
a language that requires no words
is not limited by words
nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified. — Thomas Campbell

The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity. — Joseph Brodsky

oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid - ? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified - and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what's in store for me - I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods ... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake ... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith ... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith. — Soren Kierkegaard

If our sins were only pardoned or forgiven, we would only go from being negative to being neutral. But with justification, God goes a step further and declares us to be righteous - to be 'justified'. He decides to treat us as perfectly good and righteous, like Jesus was in his earthly life. So, in that single declaration from God, we go not only from negative to neutral but also from neutral to positive. It is as if he is not only saying "Go, you're free", but also "Come near, you're actually good" - not because we are naturally good people, but because Jesus is good, and because God the judge makes that decision to treat us as though we share Jesus' goodness and righteousness. — Scott Petty

The good thing about being on a show like 'Justified' is that you stick to the premise, but not necessarily every single word that's on the page. — Mykelti Williamson

I was fortunate enough to have my kids early, so being a mom always ended up being a better gig than these other parts that came along. So I always justified not really working a lot because I had a family. — Heather Langenkamp

We are not justified by doing good works, but being justified we then do good. — William Jenkyn

Apart from all theology and its contentions, it is quite clear that the world is not good and not bad (to say nothing of its being the best or the worst), and that the terms "good" and "bad" have only significance with respect to man, and indeed, perhaps, they are not justified even here in the way they are usually employed; in any case we must get rid of both the calumniating and the glorifying conception of the world. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. — Soren Kierkegaard

Resentment, anger, frustration, worry, disappointment-negative emotional states, justified or not, take a toll on your heart, brain and body. Don't let justified emotions rob your health and well-being. — Howard Martin

We despise the grace of God when we observe the Law for the purpose of being justified. The Law is good, holy, and profitable, but it does not justify. To keep the Law in order to be justified means to reject grace, to deny Christ, to despise His sacrifice, and to be lost. — Martin Luther

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. — Jorge Luis Borges

Only if the being of creation is good, only if trust in being is fundamentally justified, are humans at all redeemable. Only if the Redeemer is also Creator can he really be Redeemer. That is why the question of what we do is decided by the ground of what we are. We can win the future only if we do not lose creation. — Pope Benedict XVI

This woman, moved by some private sorrow as much as the words being spoken, cried almost silently, unobserved by others, apart from Mma Ramotswe, who stretched out her hand and laid it on her shoulder. Do not cry, Mma, she began to whisper, but changed her words even as she uttered them, and said quietly, Yes, you can cry, Mma. We should not tell people not to weep - we do it because of our sympathy for them - but we should really tell them that their tears are justified and entirely right. — Alexander McCall Smith

She wondered whether there was any way of getting him to take the pills by trickery. She did not like the idea of using underhand methods with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, but when a person's reason was disturbed, then she thought that any means were justified in getting them better. It was as if a person had been kidnapped by some evil being and held ransom. You would not hesitate, she felt, to resort to trickery to defeat the evil being. — Alexander McCall Smith

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. 'Automatic warfare' cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance.
(...)The advent of 'automatic warfare' should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations' claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people's fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. — John Stuart Mill

I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved. — Noam Chomsky

Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this ... Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it. — Andre Breton

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented. — Gaston Bachelard

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? ... But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and
to repeat once again
Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny. — Pope John Paul II

Besides, she had just reached the autumnal period of womanhood, in which reflection is combined with tenderness, in which the beginning of maturity colours the face with a more intense flame, when strength of feeling mingles with experience of life, and when, having completely expanded, the entire being overflows with a richness in unison with its beauty. Never had she possessed more sweetness, more leniency. Secure in the thought that she would not err, she abandoned herself to a sentiment which seemed to her justified by her sorrows. And, moreover, it was so innocent and fresh! What an abyss lay between the coarseness of Arnoux and the adoration of Frederick! — Gustave Flaubert

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible? — Sam Harris

If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made. — John Howard Yoder

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis.
An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo.
Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.
For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified. — Viktor E. Frankl

I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an american or a european or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being. — Malcolm X

Those who merely possess the goods of fortune may be haughty and insolent; ... they try to imitate the great-souled man without being really like him, and only copy him in what they can, reproducing his contempt for others but not his virtuous conduct. For the great-souled man is justified in despising other people - his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride. — Aristotle.

In the tangled hierarchy sinner and saint, divine and diabolical, sacred and profane are different faces of our collective Being. Therefore angry activism driven by rage, however justified it seems, is really not going to work. I believe that the tangled hierarchy wants us to move to the next state of evolution and very strongly desires us to take that quantum leap of creativity. — Deepak Chopra

From lips indifferent of her death I heard,
Indifferently I listened to it, too,'
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe - even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, 'I alone am living - look you!' - but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow ... . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, 'Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time! — Ivan Turgenev

The irony is this: Our bodies react to stress in exactly the same way whether or not we have a good reason for being stressed. The body doesn't care if we're right or wrong. Even in those times when we feel perfectly justified in getting angry - when we tell ourselves it's the healthy response - we pay for it just the same — Howard Martin