Quotes About Judgment

Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter; I assume until proved otherwise that he belongs there.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.

most things are right or wrong only in their backgrounds; few things are good or evil in themselves.

He shall rule them with a rod of iron. —Revelations II:25

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a "Yank"—vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians.

For some tense moments it seemed that we were going to be hanged or shot or at least locked up forever in their deepest dungeon for the crime of not being Californians.

That old saw about "To understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them. My

Don't 'Father' me! I can tell a hawk from a handsaw. Anybody can, Grandmother Hazel commented. The Hawk class is a purely commercial type while the Hanshaw runabout is a sport job. Come to think about it, boys, a Hanshaw might be better than a Douglas.

Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can.

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased—he hates all creative, people equally.

I started to try to talk sense but was cut off by a giant voice from everywhere: "YOU ARE NOW BEING JUDGED!

Whoring is like military service, Ira—okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

I am not indifferent to male beauty, but my sensuality is not perfectly balanced; in the presence of a homely female and a beautiful male, I tend to look at the female. So I'll never be an esthete; I lack judgment in matters of beauty. I apologize in advance to any female who finds my primitive attitude offensive.

Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly.

Miscommunication, misunderstanding and general misjudgment of one another is vastly increased by the fact that few of us know about these levels of circuitry, and we all tend to assume that the person we are interacting with is on the same circuit we are.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

In short, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh want to sell us the oldest of all millennial legends: the True King will return soon, very soon, and cast out the usurpers. They even claim that this archetypal myth occurs in all European countries because the Priory planted it, to prepare us for the day when the seed of Jesus sits in judgment on all nations.

In daily life and in common sense, we use this agnostic caution most of the time and expect the unexpected and keep our eyes and ears open, etc. We only rush to judgment when we are under time-pressure to make a quick decision or when our prejudices are involved, as in political and religious controversy.

When there is no existential pressure for quick decisions, only prejudice asserts certitude.

Each of us has a "favorite" circuit — that is, a circuit that has been more heavily imprinted than the others. Miscommunication, misunderstanding and general misjudgment of one another is vastly increased by the fact that few of us know about these levels of circuitry, and we all tend to assume that the person we are interacting with is on the same circuit we are.

To the Idolator, events really are what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be mad or bad — delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar.

In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as exciting. In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as dull. Is the excitement or dullness in the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?

The Irish proverb quoted at the beginning — If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut — contains profound pragmatic wisdom. Maybe most people are shrewd enough to understand that, and the reports that get into books like this are a small, very small, cross-section of the Chaos that is actually going on around us. Maybe.

The more our self-esteem is tied to our competency or perceived competency, the more debilitating shame will be for us, whether it's coming from us or from others.