Damning Quotes

“Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”

“Confession is good for the soul, they say. I'd imagine this is true. But my sins were too convoluted. And from the little I understand--too damning.”

“The most successful are not the most perfect, but the imperfect who dare to believe that they can despite the damning verdict.”

“Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.”

“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”

“When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

“Irony alone is damning.The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.”

“A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”

“He threw himself to his knees at the stone and tore his damning testimony from the pages of its testament. He held the only evidence of his identity in his hand and in one motion of forfeit and justice he cast it into the fire.”

“Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be.”