Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

People who lie, particularly those who lie really big, can't do it effectively unless they feel that there's a righteous power behind what they're doing. You're entitled to lie because the end justifies the means.

I would not hold that we must judge by the favorable or adverse result alone whether an undertaking was just or unjust.

A conscientious man ought not to regard what may happen to him in this world.

Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imagined necessities... are the greatest cozenage that men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretenses to break known rules by.

The ends do not always justify the means

Perpetrators absolve their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes.

Even when we see somebody incredibly evil, there's a rationalization behind what they're doing. They're at their best when they're at the moment.

The truth needs to explain why you are the way you are, why you did what you did.

Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded.

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.

...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

We begin selling ourselves on what we want to do rather than what we ought to do. We listen to ourselves until we believe our own lies, and the we opt for happiness.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.

Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.

Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.