Blind Judgment Quotes

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

Yet the people, and even the clergy, incapable of forming any rational judgment of the business of peace and war, presumed to arraign the policy of Stilicho, who so often vanquished, so often surrounded, and so often dismissed the implacable enemy of the republic. The first moment of the public safety is devoted to gratitude and joy; but the second is diligently occupied by envy and calumny.

But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?

It is a great delusion in those whose understanding has been darkened by self-love, to think that there is any obedience in the subject who tries to draw the superior to what he wishes.

I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

It's a fairly common phenomenon of London life - people having fully developed critiques of books they haven't read and films they haven't seen. I'd probably include myself in that.

And if you think my acts are foolishness the foolishness may be in a fool's eye.

No official yet born on this earth is wise enough or generous enough to separate good ideas from bad ideas, good beliefs from bad.

A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.

When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.

What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed - only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be - then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.

I think we often live at a surface level, and that ends up with us in a lot of difficulty because we just function on assumptions and secondhand knowledge.

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

You wags that judge by rote, and damn by rule.

beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.