#judgement

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#compromise #conflict-resolution #evil #indecisiveness #judgement

The excitable observer will pass judgement first and then make knowledge conform to judgement; the prudent observer will first learn to know and then judge according to knowledge. ↗

— Thomas Cleary

#knowledge #observer #conformity

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment. ↗

— François de La Rochefoucauld

#memory #judgment

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#deduction #generated #judgement #laws #may

Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#acts #against #always #conscience #every

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties. ↗

— Charles W. Eliot

#business #certainties #judgements #probabilities #proceeds

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#judgement #sometimes #strong #judgement

Organisation can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgement. ↗

— Louis D. Brandeis

#judgement #never #organisation #substitute

Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. ↗