WHATEVER YOU DO, TELL THE TRUTH.
Presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland’s telegram response to a query as to what the Democratic Party should say about reports that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The issue was scandalous, but he won office and his first term in the presidency of the United States started in 1885.
The remnants of slavery and colonialism are ubiquitous. Slavery has been systemically embedded in the deep structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of civilization.
David Martin Jones & M. L. R. Smith, The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), p. 1.
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker, interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970).
Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), as quoted in John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
This passage was used as an epigraph by John Abramson in his book Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It (2022).
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).
It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 105.
John Morley, Voltaire (London: Macmillan and Company, 1885; 1897), p. 80.
Political liberty . . . has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties.