Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it.
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.
If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.
Useful men, who do useful things, don't mind being treated as useless.
But the useless always judge themselves as being important and hide all their incompetence behind authority.
Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
We must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the cause of disaster.
Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.
There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
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.