Justify Beliefs Quotes

When our beliefs are false we can justify anything to prove our beliefs. ~ Debasish Mridha

...any object functioning within the physical laws of any particular universe does not have free will ... In terms of human beings, all behavior and cognition cannot appear out of thin air. Behavior and cognition must be the result of prior causes. This is because our brains obey the same laws of a cause and effect physical universe just like any other physical object. All events that occur in the universe are caused by antecedent events.

Quantum indeterminacy, which maintains that the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties, is not a valid argument for free will and has been used incorrectly to justify beliefs of independent decision-making. Logically speaking, notions of randomness and indeterminism are actually additional arguments against free will. All events that occur at random in the universe are, by definition, not caused by antecedent events. Or to say it a different way, any random event cannot also be a willed event.

By the process of elimination, events that are "willed freely" are events that are neither determined nor random. In other words, in all likelihood events that are "willed freely" are events that simply do not exist. ~ Mark J. Solomon

Our beliefs become the rules we live by, and then here's what happens: We make ourselves right. ~ Cheryl Richardson

My father's politics were old-fashioned in the sense that he used to say, all the time, "You've got to fight the system!" But my spiritual beliefs have led me to believe that the fight is the problem. ~ Marianne Williamson

Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. ~ Alan W. Watts

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean. ~ Tony Robbins

The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they're all loathsome. ~ Mark Waid

People don't simply wake up one day and commit genocide. They start by setting themselves apart from others, diminishing the stature of those adhering to dissenting beliefs in small, insidious steps. They begin by saying, 'We're the righteous, and we'll tolerate those others.' And as the toleration diminishes over time, the inevitable harms are overlooked. It is for that reason that James Madison wisely wrote that 'it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties'. ~ Michael Newdow

Knowledge follows us everywhere, like a concerned friend or a persuasive lover. It's the discreet noise in our head, whose meaning we think we understand. It asks that our ears ignore what we hear and our eyes deny what we see. It attempts to tell our hearts whom to love and what to hate. At its most intrusive, knowledge is a ruthless autocrat. It will abuse us and demand that we abuse others. One thought can take us far from our normal instincts and compassions. One idea can justify atrocities. It's a simple thing to say that we are knowledge, swept from our own authenticity by words and meanings, but not so simple a thing to grasp, and to change. It's challenging, of course, but faith in ourselves makes it possible, even inevitable. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Drugs, sex, Satan, and power, Eve mused. A religious war? Hadn't humans fought and died for beliefs since the dawn of time? Animals fought for territory; people fought for territory as well. And for gain, for passion, for beliefs. For the hell of it. ~ J.D. Robb

Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us. ~ James Henry Breasted

What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught? ~ Helen Keller

Because we are not powerless biochemical machines, popping a pill every time we are mentally or physically out of tune is not the answer. Drugs and surgery are powerful tools when they are not overused, but the notion of simple drug fixes is fundamentally flawed. Every time a drug is introduced into the body to correct function A, it inevitably throws off function B, C, or D. It is not gene-directed hormones and neurotransmitters that control our bodies and our minds; our beliefs control our bodies, our minds, and thus our lives ... Oh ye of little belief! ~ Bruce H. Lipton

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs. ~ Richard Dawkins

It's my own deep-rooted feeling that our souls never truly die and that life continues in some way. I know I need to have patience as my beliefs continue to evolve with my personal growth. As I've looked around at the things I do have in my life, I've gradually started to trust in life again, little by little. I think, How could all of these other amazing things come into my life if there was not something larger than me? ~ Elizabeth Berrien

In this chapter, we've considered six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group. Tribal values also differ along other dimensions, such as the role of honor in prescribing responses to threats. Third, tribes have distinctive moral commitments, typically religious ones, whereby moral authority is vested in local individuals, texts, traditions, and deities that other groups don't recognize as authoritative. Fourth, tribes, like the individuals within them, are prone to biased fairness, allowing group-level self-interest to distort their sense of justice. Fifth, tribal beliefs are easily biased. Biased beliefs arise from simple self-interest, but also from more complex social dynamics. Once a belief becomes a cultural identity badge, it can perpetuate itself, even as it undermines the tribe's interests. Finally, the way we process information about social events can cause us to underestimate the harm we cause others, leading to the escalation of conflict. ~ Joshua Greene

The younger generations look at the beliefs of their parents and simply say "Pffft". History judges us all in the end. ~ Peter B. Lockhart

When you look in the mirror and say, 'I love you,' don't worry if you don't believe it yet. Love is far more powerful than your limiting beliefs. ~ Cheryl Richardson

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what's going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don't like too many facts, and they certainly don't like to feel stupid. Don't be so sure that you can ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. ~ Nick Harkaway

Faith is what is left after all your beliefs have been blown to hell. ~ Ram Dass

The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. ~ Aldous Huxley

What is surprising, even deeply disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice, hold on tenaciously to a standard language ideology which attempts to justify restriction of individuality and rejection of the Other ~ Rosina Lippi-Green

I know your hormones are raging right now, but that does not justify bumping off the creepy new kids in school! ~ Abra Ebner

Once upon a time, one looked to society
or class, or community
for one's normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.
But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private
and privately-measured
interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else
much less to impose it upon them ("do your own thing"). ~ Tony Judt

Whatever your (unfavorable) situation is, it is a good idea to ask yourself "WHAT YOU WOULD DO if you were free of it." An alcoholic's wife might wish her husband would stop drinking ... On examination of her beliefs, she may discover she was frightened of not achieving her own goals and actually encouraged the alcoholism so she would not have to face her own failure. ~ Seth Roberts

My beliefs are now one hundred percent against racism and segregation in any form and I also believe that we don't judge a person by the color of his skin but rather by his deeds. ~ Malcolm X

Once a person falls in the fields of love, all the rules are already broken; the lover becomes open an exalted in ways that transcend the local issues as well as the commonly held beliefs. Love, like genuine devotion, will find a way. Where duty becomes replaced with love, a greater and deeper faith will blossom forth. ~ Michael Meade

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. ~ Michael Shermer

Consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and involuntarily, willfully and unsuspectingly, our beliefs are the sum total of our lives. It's that simple. ~ Patty Houser

We have now come to a quite insidious edge in contemporary tolerance discourse. By converting the effects of inequality - for example, institutionalized racism - into a matter of "different practices and beliefs," this discourse masks the working of inequality and hegemonic culture as that which produces the differences it seeks to protect. As it essentializes difference and reifies sexuality, race, and ethnicity at the level of ideas and practices, contemporary tolerance discourse covers over the workings of power and the importance of history in producing the differences called sexuality, race, and ethnicity. It casts those culturally produced differences as innate or given, as matters of nature that divide the human species rather than as sites of inequality or domination. ~ Wendy Brown

Tolerance is not the absence of belief. Tolerance is how your beliefs teach you to treat other people ~ Timothy Keller

Perception meets you at the intersection of your beliefs and reality. ~ Bryant McGill

In an unconscious dynamic within most societies, the majority, or more accurately, the ruling or predominant minority, predicate or dictate the 'accepted' paradigm, traditions and beliefs; and the millions of people with unusual interests and even mystical experiences don't know that they are actually a huge and mostly voiceless group in the society. ~ Stephen Poplin

Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature - to say nothing of killing and dying for them - would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now? ~ Sam Harris

Don't expect red apples from mango's trees, it will not work ~ Myra Yadav

Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they've become culturally entrenched - once they've become tribal badges of honor - are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people. ~ Joshua D. Greene

What are the beliefs that give life, spirit and passion to your dream and which values will guide your decisions and actions for you to be fulfilled by your own success? ~ Archibald Marwizi

Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term "race" in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary, "Race…means descent," Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. "Therefore, it is said that a man, a hors, a dog or another animal is from a good or bad race." From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created it must be filled in-and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry's evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living "like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings, " Zurara wrote. "They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

If you want to test how powerful your mind is, simply start thinking positively and see the results for yourself. ~ Maddy Malhotra

A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. This is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society. That is what gives a nation its tone, its fiber, its integrity, its moral style, its capacity to endure. ~ John W. Gardner

My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God's word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth. ~ John Piper

It's a frightening thing to be truly honest with yourself. It means you have no one left to turn to anymore, no-one to blame, and to one to look to for salvation. You have to give up any possibility that there will ever be any refuge for you. You have to accept the reality that you are truly and finally on your own. The best thing you can hope for in life is to meet a teacher who will smash all of your dreams, dash all of your hopes, tear your teddy-bear beliefs out of your arms and fling them over a cliff. ~ Brad Warner

Learning means bringing forth the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual knowledge, skills and values, that are already within us.
Our learning starts as soon as we are born. ~ Kasi Kaye Iliopoulos

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. ~ Thomas Pynchon