Quotes About Judgment

fifteen-year-old from Shepherd's Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a 'good hiding', the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading 'I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work', but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of 'literary offal'.

The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not assume that her body ceased to be her own because she was pregnant.

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause

We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies.

I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

He summed me up very accurately for what I was: a lady, so called-a sort of a snob-and totally insecure.

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.

Schumann admitted, but only to himself that if hyenas were beautiful and could sing and dance, he would forgive them for being hyenas. But would they ever forgive him for being human?

I just don't like that you can either be ugly and smart or pretty and dumb, or ugly and nice or pretty and mean.

To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man.

None on the Court be well disposed to the hearing of reason,I'm afraid. They are gripped with fear for their own reputations.

it's easy to point fingers from a position of comfort, and nothing he or Jesus says will change that.

Liz used to joke that when she was an undergrad at Cornell, she and the girls in her sorority would play "Homeless? Or tenured professor?" while driving around the streets of Ithaca. It was a hard game.

I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?

Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.

If it were possible to treat everyone well, then anybody would do that. But sometimes we have to decide on an order. Liking everyone the same means that you don't like any one person. At least that's what I think.

in the dark you have to describe yourself. In the daylight other people describe you.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

We can hardly say that the Pharisees had an accurate 'knowledge' of man when they pointed to the sins (the real sins) of publicans and sinners. This judgment, which separated knowledge of man from self-knowledge, was as nothing in God's eyes. The Jew did not have a better understanding because he was able to judge the heathen. In the sphere of abstract morality this could possibly be said, but this is not Biblical morality - O man, who judgest others!