Justify Wrongdoing Quotes

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.

Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted]

...Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.

By the 1960s, the focus shifted to the civil rights movement, peace activists, and radical students. Red Squads again developed massive systems of files to keep track of the growing movements. While the vast majority of participants in these movements were nonviolent, police used the fact that people were arrested and that violence occurred in connection with these movements to justify surveillance and eventually active subversion; this despite the fact that the arrests and violence were often the result of discriminatory police action, rather than actual criminal wrongdoing.

No matter what turns up—in the congressional hearings probing Trump’s financial entanglements, in the Southern District of New York’s examination of wrongdoing outside Mueller’s purview—the GOP had committed itself to a fully binary view of politics that safeguards Trump’s survival. This was justified not by adherence to principle but by addiction to power: the power to hold office, the power to make laws and influence government, the power to appoint judges, the power to project ideology onto the culture at large, and the power to deny such powers to an opposing party.

The skeptic often retorts that the “criminally-minded” regularly refuse to admit their own wrongdoing and responsibility. But this is a callous and self-justifying skepticism that overlooks just how easy it is to fall down the road to prison as a result of others’ unfair practices, vicious action, or because of the vicissitudes of navigating corporate-driven dispossession, poverty, and racism.

The true sickness in a man’s heart is pride. Pride justifies wrongdoing and conceals the truth . . . even from a man’s own self. Every person is a leper on the inside, Peniel. That is the condition of each soul trying to live outside God’s sovereignty and purpose. What you see on the outside of the people of Mak’ob is an image of what’s inside everyone.

Echoes of my mother’s voice reverberated in my mind as I tossed and turned, fighting away the demons who taunted me. I chiseled away at memories made of stone and flesh and bone until I walked down a pathway alone. I could picture sadness crawling beneath my mother’s skin, though her eyes were without tears. Her hands rested in her lap with nothing to do because “in her lap with nothing to do because there were no shoeboxes of photographs to sort through, and no memories of me remained. Thousands of black wings filled the sky until they covered it in darkness. Endless shadows serenaded the emptiness. Tears were the only currency I possessed, but they weren’t for sale, so I couldn’t “pay the piper.” My mother repeated this phrase a lot to me while growing up—meaning I had to accept the consequences of my actions. The only way she could justify knowing her father abused me was by convincing herself it was all my fault. I had to pay some imaginary piper for all my evil deeds and wrongdoings. I woke up realizing it was time for me to let the piper know I owed him nothing. The piper owed me plenty, though, and I intended to collect.” Excerpt From: Samantha Hart. “Blind Pony.” iBooks.

Another problem emerges in the eighteenth century and is still with us powerfully today. I have written about this in Evil and the Justice of God. When much European culture in the eighteenth century was embracing Deism and then Epicureanism, a radical split emerged between personal sin, which stopped people going to heaven, and actual evil in the world, including human wrongdoing, violence, war, and so on, but also what has been called “natural evil,” earthquakes, tsunamis, and the rest. “Atonement theologies” then addressed the former (how can our sins be forgiven so we can go to heaven?), while the latter was called the “problem of evil,” to be addressed quite separately from any meaning given to the cross of Jesus by philosophical arguments designed to explain or even justify God’s providence. The two became radically divided from one another, and questions about the meaning of Jesus’s death were related to the former rather than the latter. The revolution that began on Good Friday—whose first fruit was the socially as well as theologically explosive event of the resurrection—seemed to be pushed to one side.

It was amazing how the human mind could justify wrongdoing but balk at the very same thing when on the receiving end.

the public has grasped that the Constitution demands wrongdoing of a very high order to justify impeachment

Forgiving someone always comes at a personal cost. The good news is that you are set free from the bondage of bitterness when you forgive. But there is a price to pay. You are giving up your right to be justified, giving up your desire to defend yourself, releasing your need to set the record straight, forgoing your longing for revenge, taking up someone’s wrongdoing only to let it go and release them. There is a death to our self-life, and it is painful to die.