Paine provided the vocabulary and the intellectual justification for fighting back.
I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
American politicians were turning to the academic community to provide the intellectual justification for confronting Soviet power.
Pain, and thoughts very different from the intellectual justifications they fed each other about the children.
She had no intellectual justification for such a feeling; just a certainty, marrow-deep, that this was the case.
At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished.
And even at that, we both had elaborate intellectual justifications for our decision to defy the law.
Nor were those who sought freedom deprived of intellectual justification.
The intellectual justifications for what we've done are relatively boring.
"What the idea had lacked was an intellectual justification and defense."