If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you'll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.
What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth'; and 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges;
but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether
the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner,
would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.
In war, the general alone can judge of certain arrangements. It depends on him alone to conquer difficulties by his own superior talents and resolution.
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Judge not of actions by their mere effect; Dive to the center, and the cause detect. Great deeds from meanest springs may take their course, And smallest virtues from a mighty source.
Now what is Judge Douglas Popular Sovereignty? It is, as a principle, no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.