Herbert Butterfield Quotes

Judge me if you want to. And as a matter of fact, it won't even count, 'cause the only person who can judge is God.

I'd like to be remembered as a man who went to Heaven and not another place.

We never, ever judge someone on who's going to heaven, hell. That's the Almighty's job.

People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'

[Thomas Jefferson is:] ... a slur upon the moral government of the world.

That which is morally wrong will never be politically right.

It's up to God to do the judging. You haven't walked in my boots, so how are you going to judge me?

Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

... God is going to judge righteously... . what did each one do in relation to what he or she knew to be right of wrong?

When Actions are a Censure upon themselves, the Reciter will always be consider'd as a Satirist.

Conscience is a judge in every man's breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, and perhaps the only incorrupt thing about him; yet, inflexible and honest as this judge is (however polluted the bench on which he sits), no man can, in my opinion, enjoy any applause which is not there adjudged to be his due.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Your quarrel is with God. I merely wish to offer Him the opportunity to judge you.

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.

There are no souls in the world that are so fearful to judge others as those that do most judge themselves, nor so careful to make a righteous judgment of men or things as those that are most careful to judge themselves.

With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

One easily bears moral reproof, but never mockery.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

In our day it's worse to judge evil than to do evil.

God will judge people on the basis of what they did in light of what they knew.

God judges what we tolerate as well as what we practice. Too often we put up with things we ought to put out.

Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.

The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed.

If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.