Justify Quotes

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.

I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.

I think people could justify labeling me if they saw a pattern in what I do, but right now that's impossible.

The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.

As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps' use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.

Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

I had given up magic, because it had reached a state of perfection. I felt that I was able to transform men into animals. I did not make use of this capability, because I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

I feel like I'm always having to justify why I haven't kept in touch with anyone from the old days in Stoke-on-Trent, but I'm like that with anybody. I don't let anybody in. I just rely on myself.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.

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

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.

You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, 'Things happen for a reason', there's a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

To leave in search of yourself, of your real needs, is easier when you don't have to justify yourself to anyone, when there are not too many people bestowing you their attention.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.

All the time I feel I must justify my existence.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

I felt strongly that since the pursuit of good science was so difficult it was essential that the problem being studied was an important one to justify the effort expanded.

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.

It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.