community judgment Quotes

You got to look nice. If you got 10 kids, they'll talk about you if you don't look nice.

I still use a lot of good values from growing up in the Church, and there was a sense of community. But you were also being heavily judged by people that wanted to look down on you for not being as great as they are.

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconsistent, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.

The best loved man or maid in the town would perish with anguish Could they hear all that their friends say in the course of a day.

The only real shaming I've ever experienced has been from other gay people when I reveal my politics or my religion.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power—to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the over- zealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.

I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.

When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

For when morality is strictly up to the individual, with no judgment possible by communities it is likely that everyone will do what is right in his own eyes.... America will then become a land composed of strangers whose religion, if any, is a private matter, and who are bound by no social ties or common aspirations.

Growing up a preacher's kid wasn't the easiest thing. Everybody's always watching you to see how you'll behave - or misbehave.

If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.