Self Justification Quotes

Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it "totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter." George Reedy, one of Johnson's aides, said that he "had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the 'truth' which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality." Although Johnson's supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man's character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction. ~ Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

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

Don't I know by now that folk see their sins in the way they choose? There's always a reason as to why selfishness is not really selfish and crimes are honest and waiting safely by while somefolk else is killed is really the more courageous choice. ~ Megan Campisi

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world" as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

Our sin warps our understanding because we all tend toward self-justification. Studying ~ Tim Chester

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

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her - that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. ~ George Eliot

As soon as the words presented themselves, Gabriel knew that they were perfect for him. Perfect for what he was contemplating doing to her. Perfect for his own self-justification.
Tasting. Taking. Sucking. Sinning. Draining. Abandoning.
She was pure. She was innocent. He wanted her.
Facilis descensus Averni.
But he would not be the one to make her bleed. He could not, would not, make another girl bleed for the rest of his life. All thoughts of seduction and mad, passionate f*cking on desks and chairs, against walls and bookshelves and windows, immediately gave way. He would not take her. He would not mark her and claim what he had no right to claim. ~ Sylvain Reynard

Self-justification is a verbal defense for restoring the appearance of righteousness without doing anything about the substance. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

The act of gaining true insights from self - reflection is a futile action for most ... as there are easy way out things like self justification, rationalization, delusions and denial which keeps us away from our true self, the inner core and thus we live contented ~ Anubhav Mishra

SAYING OF SHEIKH ZIAUDIN:
Self-justification is worse than the original offence. ~ Idries Shah

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification. ~ Storm Jameson

The false gospel of self-justification is a great enemy of the Christian faith because so many have been misled to believe that it is Christianity. ~ Gloria Furman

It sounded, I told him, as if he had never learned to balance projecting goals into the future with appreciating and living in the present.
...
To the extent that our goal is to "prove" ourselves or ward off the fear of failure, this balance is difficult to achieve. We are too driven. Not joy but anxiety is our motor.
But if our aim is self-expression rather than self-justification, the balance tends to come more naturally. We will still need to think about its daily implementation, but the anxiety of wounded self-esteem will not make the task nearly impossible. ~ Nathaniel Branden

Cleverness builds ever more elaborate structures of self-justification ... But in the end you know what is and what is not right. All men do, though they may spend their years trying to bury that knowing, burying it beneath words, hatred, lusts, sorrow, or any of the other bricks from which they build their lives ... When the time comes, you'll know. But knowing is never enough. ~ Mark Lawrence

Fanatics clouded by self-justification. ~ Toba Beta

Through my memory of the Passion, God can "purify" my memory of wrongs suffered because my identity stems neither from the wrongdoing done to me, which would require the perpetual accusation of my wrongdoer, nor from my own (false) innocence, which would lead me to (illegitimate) self-justification. ~ Miroslav Volf

30:20 - This is the way of an adulterous woman: she eats and wipes her mouth, and says, "I have done no wickedness." It's become a mantra in our society: "But I'm really a good person!" Unbelievers and believers alike often make this claim after they do what God's Word calls sin. But sin requires repentance, not self-justification or denial. ~ Charles F. Stanley

The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and again by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church - or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of "Church" - becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? Supposing this "Church," which is in reality no church at all, takes to herself the function of declaring that everyone else is guilty and rationalizing the sins of her members as acts of virtue? Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? Suppose that she provides men with a convenient method of deciding when they do or do not need to accuse themselves of anything before God? Supposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval?

This is what explains the fact that some men can commit murder in the name of Christ and believe themselves guiltless, indeed congratulate themselves on having served Him well. For them, the function of "the Church" is to provide a milieu in which one can decide what is and is not guilty, what is or is not sinful. The "Church" becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. The fact that others then accuse them of hypocrisy and of flagrant infidelity to truth only confirms them in their own self-assured righteousness. The "Church" in such an event becomes a machine for setting the unquiet conscience at rest. It is a perfectly efficient ~ Thomas Merton

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

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

Self-justification is a treacherous servant. ~ Wellington Mara

Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. ~ Carol Tavris

Do not make passion an argument for truth! - O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for independent self-justification. What greater security than to lean confidently on God, on the Fount of creation, the most terrifying power of all? If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop by himself. ~ Ernest Becker

What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's. ~ David Mitchell

She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them. ~ Nick Hornby

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

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

Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples. ~ Pema Chodron

Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. ~ Eric Metaxas

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle. ~ Paul Tournier

When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to "prove" our worth but to live our possibilities. ~ Nathaniel Branden

Self-justification, that was the danger
the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all. ~ Hugh Nibley

Self-justification is unjust. ~ Toba Beta

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

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

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. ~ Richard J. Foster

Could I see that God wanted to transform my life from a somewhat ugly, useless branch to an arrow, a tool usable in His hands, for the furtherance of His purposes?....To be thus transformed, was I willing - am I till willing - for the whittling, sandpapering, stripping, processes necessary in my Christian life? The ruthless pulling off of leaves and flowers might include doing without a television set or washing machine, remaining single in order to see a job done, re-evaluating the worthiness of the ambition to be a "good" doctor (according to my terms an values). The snapping of thorns might include drastic dealing with hidden jealousies and unknown prides, giving up prized rights in leadership and administration. The final stripping of the bark might include lessons to be learned regarding death to self - self-defence,self-pity, self-justification, self-vinidication, self-sufficiency, all the mechanisms of preventing the hurt of too deep involvment. Am I prepared for the pain, which may at times seem like sacrifice, in order to be made a tool in His service? My willingness will be a measure of the sincerity of my desire to express my heartfelt gratitude to Him for his so-great salvation. Can I see such minor "sacrifices" in light of the great sacrifice of Calvary, where Christ gave all for me? ~ Helen Roseveare

I have been thinking about the idea of excuses for some time now. They are like menacing demons that creep into our lives without us knowing. They are roadblocks, white lies to ourselves, a reason to set the bar lower, and self-justification for achieving less than our full potential. ~ Lorii Myers

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

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. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. ~ Carol Tavris

Your capacity for self-justification and rationalization." "If it were an Olympic sport, I'd medal. ~ Tiffany Reisz

The various Eichmann testimonies are truly staggering in their total volume. But how, if at all, can they be used? Even more than most memoirs, the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically perpetrator testimony as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise.
-- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 8-9. ~ Christopher R. Browning

In any case, though, I believe that I have no been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or means of self-justification but because it's true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound, but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much. ~ Haruki Murakami

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

I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply.

In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or a means of self-justification but because it is true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much.

This may be an over-analytical way of looking at things. Don't you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not over-analytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. "This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which such-and-such."

Like that. I can't tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or complicate it.

In any case, I myself feel that I am far closer to recovery than I once was, and people here tell me this is true. This is the first time in a long whil ~ Haruki Murakami

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction. ~ Luc Delahaye

Saint-Just, the contemporary of Sade, finally arrives at the justification of crime, though he starts from
very different principles. Saint-Just is, of course, the anti-Sade. If Sade's formula were "Open the prisons
or prove your virtue," then Saint-Just's would be: "Prove your virtue or go to prison." Both, however,
justify terrorism - the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism.
Absolute good and absolute evil, if the necessary logic is applied, both demand the same degree of
passion ~ Albert Camus

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide. ~ Cesare Pavese

If a preacher is cultured, gentle, earnest, intellectual, and broadly tolerant, the sheep of God run after him. He, of course, speaks beautifully about Christ, and uses the old words redemption, the cross, even sacrifice and atonement-but what is his Gospel? That is the crucial question. Is salvation, perfect, entire, eternal,-justification, sanctification, glory,-the alone work of Christ, and the free gift of God to faith alone? ~ C.I. Scofield

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons?afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it. ~ Saul Alinsky

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a spec of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo

So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

So in the midst of our struggle with indwelling sin, we must continually keep our focus on the gospel. We must always go back to the truth that even in the face of the fact that so often "I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing" (Rom 7:19), there is no condemnation. God no longer counts our sins against us (Rom 4:8). Or, to say it another way, God wants us to find our primary joy in our objectively declared justification, not in our subjectively perceived sanctification. Regardless of how much progress we make in our pursuit of holiness, it will never come close to the absolute perfect righteousness of Christ that is ours through our union with him in his life and death. So we should learn to live with the discomfort of the justified life. We should accept the fact that as still-growing Christians we will always be dissatisfied with our sanctification. But at the same time, we should remember that in Christ we are justified. ~ Jerry Bridges

The feelings for each of them competing for space in my heart and justification in my mind. ~ Jordan Deen

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

You give a lot of great advice about what to do. Do you have any advice of what not to do?


Don't do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don't focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore. Don't seek joy at all costs. I know it's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do - have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself - as I did every damn time - the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I'm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I've still got work to do. ~ Cheryl Strayed

What the Indians are saying is that they are recognizing the right of wilderness to be wilderness. Wilderness is not an extension of human need or of human justification. It is itself and it is inviolate, itself. This does not mean that, therefore, we become separated from it, because we don't. We stay connected if, once in our lives, we learn exactly what that connection is between our heart, our womb, our mind, and wilderness. And when each of us has her wilderness within her, we can be together in a balanced kind of way. The forever, we have that within us. ~ Paula Gunn Allen

Such emotions, sudden bursts of sexual jealousy that pursue us through life, sometimes without the smallest justification that memory or affection might provide, are like wounds, unknown and quiescent, that suddenly break out to give pain, or at least irritation, at a later season of the year, or in an unfamiliar climate. ~ Anthony Powell

For the assertion that "There is no God" is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that "There is a God." Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does. ~ William Lane Craig

The only justification of private property," said Orren Boyle, "is public service. ~ Ayn Rand

Love is not a justification for war. Anyone who uses it as such doesn't know squat about being human. ~ Cecily White

The main factors that sponsor the abuse of time include procrastination and excuses. Procrastination makes you to shift a task that you can do now into the unseen future; excuses are the reasons why you shift that task. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

So sanctification isn't something we lean back on, as much as it's something we lean into. Rather than being an action only God can do, all by Himself (the way justification and adoption are), sanctification is an endeavor He undertakes in full cooperation and partnership with us. It requires us to exert what you might call "grace-driven effort" - made possible only by the merciful initiative of God, of course, and yet fully employing our human brains, brawn, and body parts as we go. ~ Matt Chandler

Each of us bears a responsibility to reject hate, whatever its form, whatever its justification. ~ George Takei

In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature. ~ Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

What is past is past. never go back. Not for excuses. Not for justification, not for happiness. You are what you are, the world is what it is. ~ Mario Puzo

Then, at the end of every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this time forgotten all about the game. ~ Charles Dickens

I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as - under any pretext - with any justification - through any temptation - to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I wish I had fair justification for not being as informed as I should be, but I don't. ~ Joaquin Phoenix

From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called state of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America. ~ James A. Michener

Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

We all are like filthy rags in the site of God; not one clean enough, good enough, righteous enough, to stand before a holy God. ~ Robin Bertram

Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good. ~ Ayn Rand

Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized. ~ Albert Einstein

Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. ~ Frantz Fanon