“I've always been a very good judge of people. That's why I like so very few of them.”
Source: The Christmas Note
After the Supreme Court declared the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act (NJAC Act) to be unconstitutional, as quoted " LS members disapprove Supreme Court's scrapping of NJAC law http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/ls-members-disapprove-supreme-court-s-scrapping-of-njac-law-115120700994_1.html" Business Standard (7 December 2015)
“I've always been a very good judge of people. That's why I like so very few of them.”
Source: The Christmas Note
Quoted by Robert Boothby in Robert Boothy, Recollections of a Rebel (London: Hutchison, 1978), pp. 183–84.
Post-war years (1945–1955)
“A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.”
bonus iudex damnat inprobanda, non odit.
De Ira (On Anger): Book 1, cap. 16, line 6.
Moral Essays
"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.
Clare Boothe Luce http://books.google.com/books?id=mVYfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22A+Broadway+play+is+so+much+an+event+designed+down+to+the+bit+parts+to+explode+in+your+face+on+one+particular+night+that+it+is+hard+to+judge+any+one+of+them+fairly+from+the+scrawny+instructions+known+as+a+script%22&pg=PA69#v=onepage (1982)
“No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.”
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 23.
Context: To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Manuel, in Ch. I : How Manuel Left the Mire
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: I shall not ever return to you, my pigs, because, at worst, to die valorously is better than to sleep out one's youth in the sun. A man has but one life. It is his all. Therefore I now depart from you, my pigs, to win me a fine wife and much wealth and leisure wherein to discharge my geas. And when my geas is lifted I shall not come back to you, my pigs, but I shall travel everywhither, and into the last limits of earth, so that I may see the ends of this world and may judge them while my life endures. For after that, they say, I judge not, but am judged: and a man whose life has gone out of him, my pigs, is not even good bacon.
ibid.
Books, articles, and speeches