“Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.”
"The Dreamers"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)
Context: The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.
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Karen Blixen 67
Danish writer 1885–1962Related quotes
Source: Because of Winn-Dixie
“But when I asked myself, as I often do: 'What would Judge Friendly have done?”
March 18, 2016, Merrick Garland, Presentation of the Friendly Medal to William H. Webster, May 24, 2013, American Law Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5U6ekOfpi4, and also excerpted quote in:
[March 18, 2016, The Quotable Merrick Garland: A Collection of Writings and Remarks, http://www.nationallawjournal.com/home/id=1202752327128/The-Quotable-Merrick-Garland-A-Collection-of-Writings-and-Remarks, Zoe Tillman, The National Law Journal, March 16, 2016, 0162-7325]
Court opinions and media comments
“Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see.”
The Other World (1657)
Context: Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages.
I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street.
First gubernatorial campaign (1958), quoted in George Wallace: Conservative Populist (2004) by Lloyd Earl Rohler
1950s
“The world at large does not judge us by who we are and what we know; it judges us by what we have.”
As quoted in On Being Blonde: Wit and Wisdom from the World's Most Infamous Blondes (2004) by Paula Munier, p. 70
Speech, (3 November 1952) as quoted in "The Graceful Loser" in TIME (23 July 1965) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,841890,00.html
Prologue (p. 3)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)