“Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.”
As quoted in Dictionary of American maxims (1955) edited by David George Plotkin.
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Theodore Parker31
abolitionist 1810–1860Related quotes
Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Leó Szilárd (1898–1964) Physicist and biologist
As quoted in Leo Szilard : His Version of the Facts, edited by S. R. Weart and G. W. Szilard, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1979), Vol. 35, No. 2, p. 38
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), p. 259.
Variant: It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest, and its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
As extended upon in Adventures of Ideas (1933), Pt. 4, Ch. 16.
Context: Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice
Address at the dedication of the Northwestern University Law School Building, Chicago, Illinois (20 October 1902); republished in Holmes' Collected Legal Papers (1937), p. 272.
1900s
“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic
"Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/aremoviespieces.html (December 1964), from I Lost It at the Movies (1965).
William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) British politician
Conversation at a dinner in 10 Downing Street (24 September 1791), quoted in George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth, Volume I (London: John Murray, 1847), p. 72.
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian
Source: The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)