I guess as long as people think of me for different ages, I'll trust their opinion. I remember noticing one year that Michelle Monaghan played 34 and 19, so I've kind of clung to that as my justification that I can be Jake Gyllenhaal's wife and a freshman in college in the same year.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

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.

Little white lies are part of everyday life. If you're in court being charged with a felony, you're probably going to be tempted to lie. Or if your girlfriend asks you if the sweater she is wearing makes her look fat; you're going to lie because you love that person. There are different reasons and justifications to lie; it's human nature.

To state that lethal force should not be used without a proper legal justification is to state the obvious.

We don't have a good legal justification for breaking up the banking system. But if I could wave a magic wand, I'd break up the banking system.

If my own country is subverting the rule of law and sending its own citizens, its military, into harm's way on the basis of lies and propaganda, I would argue that being a patriot is calling out those lies and saying, 'No, you don't send our military into harm's way with no legal justification.'

We don't have a good legal justification for breaking up the banking system.

The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.

The Declaration of Independence was to set forth the moral justification of a rebellion against a long-recognized political tradition - the divine right of kings.

Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.

Everything is always feasible if you run a corporate finance exercise: you can always try to come out with a justification on how things could work. But the real issue is to say how do you translate that into practice.

Republicans turned against organized workers and abandoned the idea of promoting equality at the bottom of the economic scale. They turned their idea of economic harmony into a justification for supporting industrialists, who were the nation's job creators.

There is no excuse for violence. There is never a justification for anyone to impose themselves on someone else. And it will always be incorrect when it comes to a man and a woman, regardless of what might have happened. You need to be man enough to take the blow. That is always the best way. Do not put your hands on a woman.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

A lot of people are upset when you work out your anger issues, but there's a big industry for music which is furious and angry because, in my opinion, the world is looking for a justification to feel the same way.

The need to justify oneself only arises when there is a breach of trust or trust deficit between two people. In both circumstances, justifications won't help build any bridges in the relationship.

The thing about justifications is that they're required when there's not enough truth in what we're doing to justify it without justifying it.

In advising the heads of state to learn from tragedy rather than perpetuate its existence Robert Kennedy excalimed, "Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." We have a tendency to dwell on tragedy and use it as a justification for tragic occurrences that follow,rather than parse the tragedy, taking from it important lessons and using those lessons to avoid similar tragedies.

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist's subject be religious to be Christian? I don't think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

One thing we should not forget: if we don't guard against those trying to sell justifications for letting the gory constructions of their criminal instincts run wild and concoct pretexts for their malicious acts, we might miss out on the moments they are stealing the appropriate junctures, impersonate a God and usurp the spirit of religious beliefs. ("No longer in the middle?")

We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.