Daily Inspiration Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas isn’t bargaining with history here; he’s drawing a hard moral border and daring politics to stay on its side. The phrasing is deliberately juridical: “no excuse,” “regardless,” “carried out.” It reads less like a slogan than a constraint, a rule meant to survive the pressure of outrage, retaliation, and the seductions of “understandable” violence. In an era when public debate often treats terrorism as either inexplicable evil or regrettable but strategic necessity, Habermas insists on a third stance: explain causes all you want, but don’t let explanation metastasize into exoneration.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To those tempted to romanticize political violence as the language of the oppressed, he refuses the moral alibi of motive. To states eager to fold “exceptional” violence into counterterror policy, he implicitly warns against symmetry: if terrorism is unjustifiable on moral grounds, then moral reasoning cannot be switched off when the flag changes. “From a moral point of view” is doing more work than it appears; it marks a boundary between moral judgment and political calculus, and it also hints at Habermas’s larger project: democracy depends on norms that can be publicly justified, not on outcomes that merely “work.”

Context matters. Habermas wrote and spoke often in the shadow of 20th-century extremism and, later, post-9/11 security politics. The line functions as a stabilizer in a panicked discourse: a reminder that modern societies don’t just need safety; they need principles sturdy enough to constrain what we do in the name of safety.