Justification Quotes

“Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

“To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“There are two sides to every story, as if that explains and justifies everything! You know what I say when someone tells me that? I say well of course there are two sides to every story, and one side is WRONG!”
― Nikki Sex, Carmen's New York Romance Trilogy

“I have heard several people justify working long hours and getting home from work late it night by saying things like, “I have to put in all this time to make up for the vacation we’re going to take this summer.” I bet if I asked your kids, they’d say that they’d rather have you home every night to play with them than the weeklong summer trip to the lake where you’re stressed out the whole time anyways.”
― Daniel Willey

“Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.

Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our cooperation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.”
― N.T. Wright, Justification: God's Plan & Paul's Vision

“Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.”
― Max Frisch, Montauk

“When God justifies a sinner everything in God is on the sinner's side.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Radical Cross: Living the Passion of Christ

“I can explain why I have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What's bad is bad even if necessary.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Interlude #1

“It is through justification of one's actions that a completely guiltless life is possible.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“My head is a prison I’ve been locked in from the start,
So if I'm treated like a criminal I might as well play the part.

(attrib: E. Tancarville)”
― Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“We shall be judged according to our works – this is why we are exhorted to do good works. The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works. The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith. No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith. Grace and active obedience are complementary. There is no faith without good works, and no good works apart from faith.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“Reality is complicated. There is no justification for all of the hasty conclusions.”
― Hideki Yukawa

“The Spirit of God draws or leads the sinner from one phase to another, gradually, in proportion as one is found having a disposition to responsive hearing. Grace flows ordinarily from prevenient grace through the grace of baptism through the grace of justification toward sanctifying grace leading toward consummation in glory. The power by which one cooperates with grace is grace itself. In this way God draws all to himself, eliciting a hunger for righteousness and a desire for truth.”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace

“We cry down the law in respect of justification, but we set it up as a rule of sanctification. The law sends us to the Gospel that we may be justified; and the Gospel sends us to the law again to inquire what is our duty as those who are justified.”
― Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom

“A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.”
― Don Cupitt, Crisis of Moral Authority

“Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse

“Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the truth, it would be too late.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“I am now convinced that we have recently become possessed of experimental evidence of the discrete or grained nature of matter, which the atomic hypothesis sought in vain for hundreds and thousands of years. The isolation and counting of gaseous ions, on the one hand, which have crowned with success the long and brilliant researches of J.J. Thomson, and, on the other, agreement of the Brownian movement with the requirements of the kinetic hypothesis, established by many investigators and most conclusively by J. Perrin, justify the most cautious scientist in now speaking of the experimental proof of the atomic nature of matter, The atomic hypothesis is thus raised to the position of a scientifically well-founded theory, and can claim a place in a text-book intended for use as an introduction to the present state of our knowledge of General Chemistry.”
― Wilhelm Ostwald, Grundriss Der Allgemeinen Chemie...

“most people live their life as if their justification depends on their sanctification: if I do and become all that I must do and become, God will love me and accept me.”
― Tullian Tchividjian

“The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions.”
― A.A. Michelson, Studies in Optics

“He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.”
― Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner

“In short, an astonishingly broad spectrum of theologies of justification existed in the later medieval period, encompassing practically every option that had not been specifically condemned as heretical by the Council of Carthage. In the absence of any definitive magisterial pronouncement concerning which of these options (or even what range of options) could be considered authentically catholic, it was left to each theologian to reach his own decision in this matter. A self-perpetuating doctrinal pluralism was thus an inevitability.”
― Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation

“No justice. No gain.”
― Nadair Desmar

“The author compares the struggles of Martin Luther with the prevailing doctrine that a little genuine effort on our part results in a disproportionate reward of God's righteousness with a blind man who would be given $1 million – if only he could see.”
― Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction

“Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“Better exert power than justify it!”
― Raheel Farooq