Quotes About Judgment

This is a difficult country to look too different in—the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it—and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But

Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can't do that if you're not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you're going to get them wrong.

Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics—cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land.

God's love is not the same as human love. [Our] love...is fraught with conditions, delusion, and judgment.

A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"?

Play is learning how to wait, how to applaud someone else's success, how to let others go first. It's reciprocity and laughter. It's very simple and it brings us deeply into the Now, and just for a while, maybe for the rest of the day, you don't have to judge yourself or kill anyone.

Whales might not lie, but like anybody else, Sean suspected they probably wanted to put the best spin they could on an error in judgment when called to account for their actions.

A gitar for Menolly? So we can judge the range of sounds she can make?

fashion. I'm sure he mistook you for one of those…

Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.

If you drive a man to choose between death of his body or corruption of his soul, how much are you also to blame if his choice is the wrong one?

Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be. There will be a great many things you can achieve not by attacking them but with a little patience and a modicum of flattery. Stop to consider what it is you really want, rather than pursuing your anger or your vanity to charge in. So often we leap to passionate judgments—when if we but knew the one thing more, they would be so different.

He was a man of absolutes, he had been for as long as she had known him, and time had deepened his character rather than mellowed it. He was wiser, more mature in judgment and temper than in his youth, but in the last analysis his heart would always rule his head. He was the stuff of crusaders, and of martyrs.

I believe morality is universal. Circumstances may alter the degree of blame, but not that an act is wrong.

she hated the streak of cruelty she knew in him, the arrogance, the frequent insensitivity. And he was a fool where judgment of character was concerned. He could no more read a woman's wiles than a dog could read Spanish! He was consistently attracted to the very last sort of woman who could ever make him happy.

Not all the inquisitors of Spain were cruel or narrow-minded men, you know. Some truly believed they were saving the souls of those in their charge. They would be astounded if they knew how we perceived them now.

One man's sin does not justify another's.

Have you noticed how one condemns most self-righteously that which one has never had the opportunity to do?

We should respect not only the facts but the law. If we do not, then we lay ourselves open to every man's judgment of what may be true or false; and a belief of guilt will become the same thing as proof. There must be something above individual judgment, however passionately felt, or we become barbarous again." "Of course he may be guilty," she said very quietly.

The time will come when we ourselves are disliked or misunderstood, or strangers, different from our judges in race or class or creed, and if their sense of justice depends upon their passion rather than their morality, who is to speak for us then, or defend our right to the truth?

see nothing attractive in behaving like a fool when you don't have to.

And I am aware of her failings as well. She was impatient, she did not tolerate foolishness or indecision. Too often she did not listen to the views of others, and she was hasty in her judgment, but when she was wrong she apologized." His voice softened and he blinked rapidly. "She was a creature of high idealism

The more we think we are sophisticated sometimes the sillier we get—and certainly the more idle people there are with nothing to fill their minds except making moral rules for everyone else, the more hypocrisy there is as to who keeps them and who doesn't.