Self Justification Quotes:

Eradicate self-justification. Then alone can you annihilate your ego.

- Sivananda

topic: Self, Ego, Self Justification

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

topic: Animal, Practice, Vegetarianism, Factory Farming, Vegan Health

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

source: "Stop the Madness". "The Globe and Mail" Newspaper, July 6, 2002.

topic: Honesty, Integrity, Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Modern Politics

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

- Carol Tavris

topic: Self, Views, People, Pierce, Self Justification

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Causes, Literature, Reason, Self Justification

When your sin is exposed, you will run toward confession and forgiveness or self-righteousness and self-justification.

- Paul David Tripp

source: Twitter post from Jul 03, 2015

topic: Running, Self, Sin, Self Righteousness, Self Justification

Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

topic: Self, Judging, Grace, Judging Others, Self Justification

Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it's also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.

- Elliot Aronson

topic: Self Esteem, Lows, Justification, High Self Esteem, Self Justification

As water and fire oppose one another when combined, so are self-justification and humility opposed to one another.

- Marcus Eremita

topic: Inspirational, Christian, Religious, Water And Fire, Self Justification

The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

- Michael Foley

source: Michael Foley (2010). “The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

topic: Flower, Self, Imagination, Jesuit, Self Justification

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

- Arthur Erickson

topic: Artist, Men, Self, Self Justification, Self Made Man

Don't prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready.

- Steven Pressfield

source: "Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way". Book by Steven Pressfield, 2011.

topic: Enemy, Preparation, Brain, Alibis, Self Justification

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

- Wellington Mara

topic: Self, Servant, Justification, Treacherous, Self Justification

The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.

- Paul Tournier

topic: Block, Men, Self, Self Justification

An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a 'scoffer'.

- Timothy Keller

topic: Religious, Mistake, Book, Religious Community, Scoffers

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

- Tullian Tchividjian

topic: Self, Care, Narrative, Self Justification

Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

- Thomas Szasz

topic: Self, Gains, Succeed, Modifying, Psychoanalysis

It is not his business to argue men into faith, for that cannot be done; but it is his business to demonstrate the intellectual adequacy of the biblical faith and the comparative inadequacy of its rivals, and to show the invalidity of the criticisms that are brought against it. This he seeks to do, not from any motive of intellectual self-justification, but for the glory of God and His gospel.

- J. I. Packer

source: J. I. Packer (1958). “"Fundamentalism" and the Word of God”, p.34, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

topic: Biblical, Men, Self, Adequacy, Self Justification

The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.

- Immanuel Wallerstein

topic: Religious, Self, Favors, Self Justification

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

- Storm Jameson

source: Storm Jameson (2011). “The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell”, p.22, A&C Black

topic: Vanity, Self, Justification, Self Justification

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

source: "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973.

topic: Spiritual, Self, Imagination, Spiritual Strength, Self Justification

I haven't seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were askedthis week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company's behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.

- Anna Quindlen

topic: Art, New York, Self, Philip, Morris

To talk over a quarrel, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-justification, is too much like handling cobwebs to be very successful.

- Margaret Deland

topic: Successful, Self, Cobwebs, Self Justification

it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors that the master is lesser than the slave.

- Elizabeth Gould Davis

source: "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 21: "The Prejudice Lingers On", 1971.

topic: Men, Self, Years, Subjection, Endorsements

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

- Anita Brookner

topic: Love, Moving, Men, Guise, Self Justification

Possessed, as are all the fair daughters of Eve, of an hereditary propensity, transmitted to them undiminished through succeeding generations, to be 'soonmoved withtheslightesttouch of blame'; very little precept and practice will confirm them in the habit, and instruct them all the maxims, of self-justification.

- Maria Edgeworth

topic: Daughter, Self, Practice, Self Justification