It is a blindness, and a self-inflicted one, and it is very often fatal to the person who indulges it.

Because when you hold someone in contempt, you stop actually seeing them.

You replace the real, complex, capable person in front of you with a flat caricature, the dull accountant, the timid wife, the paper-pusher, and then you make all your decisions based on the caricature rather than the person, and the gap between the two is where you are destroyed.

The Vances did not launder their scheme in front of me because they were careless.