Justify

Famous quotes containing the word justify:

    If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
    Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)

    In the small circle of pain within the skull
    You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
    Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
    Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
    Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
    Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
    And we must think no further of you.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)