Quotes About Judgment

I feel the same about cocaine as I do about eating meat," she said. "It's vile and ultimately morally reprehensible, but as long as I don't pay for it—I find it quite enjoyable.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

Grandma Ponder said, Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater.

It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.

She has regular features but yet one could not say that she was pretty. She is too big and too stout. Her features are not regular and yet one could say that she is very pretty. She is too small and too thin. She's a voice teacher

I don't believe in seeing evil in everything. I leave that to the inquisitors.

Note, too, that fiction writers inevitably catch their central characters in situations involving ambiguities, not contradictories. The marshal in High Noon was being asked to choose not between a good and a bad but between two goods (or two bads, depending upon your angle of view).

She had parlor house written all over her--a blonde pig who looked more like a whore than twenty-five whores, with a face like an overgrown doll's and a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear's feet.

Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.

Most people have to die to get to Hell. I took a shortcut.

Our moral decisions about ourselves can be spiritual. Our moral decisions about other people can only be practical.

I have no interest in declaring how people should organize their personal lives. Jesus said, "Judge not,"26 and I take that to heart: if you are peering into another person's soul, you are looking in the wrong direction. But after a long life, I can report anecdotally that all the most joyful people I have ever met were married, and all the happiest marriages I have ever seen were arranged, in some sense, on the Ephesian principles.

For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn't? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it's Casablanca in fact.

There is something that lessens the horror of a crime when one sees the criminal—who has been depicted as a monster—is just like any other man.

Christian fundamentalism: the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.

If any important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house . . . submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

One person sees the beautiful view and the other sees the dirty window

We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it's okay to hate those other people because they're the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.

Don't let our skepticism turn into cynicism. Not everyone with a crazy story is crazy.

Leviticus 24:16

My gut says to like him. The rational part of my brain tells me to pay attention to the obvious.