self-justification

Cameron employed liar and convicted criminal Andy Coulson in No10 - and then hid behind self-justificatory twaddle about second chances.

Unfortunately, he has veered off into the biggest political sulk since Edward Heath's, barely ever turning up at the Commons and, save for a rather self-justificatory attack on Rupert Murdoch, saying almost nothing of any value since leaving Number Ten.

It seems ironic that the self-justificatory nature of therapists' genuflections to theory can, in effect, efface their own very real and often potent co-presence in a moment of shared lived experience.

The leading positions have hardened and spin inwardly in self-justificatory spirals--or perhaps epicycles--of increasingly self-consistent but dialogically barren arguments.

Again, the publication of the script in advance of opening reveals much about Young's ambitions: his preface discusses spelling and pronunciation conventions and admits that he "had to do the version in some haste--half of it in four days." (16) The explicitly didactic and self-justificatory format is perpetuated: this edition also contains a glossary, sixteen pages of notes, and a selection of critical opinions of The Puddocks.

He recognizes the bad faith of his excuse that an "artist must taste all experience, from the noblest to the most degraded" (164) in order to justify himself, as well as the sophistry of the paradox that the poet needs to tell self-justificatory lies in order to experience "moral squalor." In this self-recognition of an impasse that is at once personal and writerly, the text draws towards an ending with the 24-year-old John still awaiting a visit from destiny: "he would rather be bad than boring, has no respect for a person who would rather be bad than boring, and no respect either for the cleverness of being able to put his dilemma neatly into words" (165).

In fact, his position is that the justification and questioning of equality dialectically turn into their opposites; as such, equality shows itself to be both self-justificatory and self-questioning.

This endeavour takes us again to the question on the possibility of a presuppositionless thinking insofar the beginning of the self-justificatory task cannot be caused by the intervention of an external agent (either a prior ground or a predetermined aim) but it is a move prompted by the consciousness of the articulations of thinking as a continuous motion of development.

Sentences such as those below quite clearly demonstrate a preening and self-justificatory writing.

The poem, though, reverses the facts of history, presenting the Muslims as the foul enemy of faith, and turning the event into a self-justificatory epic between a Christian saintly 'us' and a demonic 'them'.

Unfortunately, self-justificatory statements often accompany gross actions of self-interest.

The study of Manon in the introduction is a remarkably clear survey of the evolution of a figure traditionally regarded as enigmatic, taking on board all the deviousness and lies of which she can be suspected, but tracing consistent patterns of motivation and showing how, despite everything, she emerges as a pitiable figure, victim of a lover whose self-justificatory rhetoric, more effective in the short than the long term, ultimately fails to hide weaknesses and inconsistencies in his own attitude, and whose role in the destruction of Manon cannot be veiled.