Justify

Famous quotes containing the word justify:

    “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.”
    —Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)

    “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)

    “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)