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Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?
--
Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (1866), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 

Thomas Carlyle

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An untruth must be spoken, where need requires. For whether men lie, or say true, it is with one and the same object. Men lie, because they think to gain by deceiving others; and speak the truth, because they expect to get something by their true speaking, and to be trusted afterwards in more important matters. Thus, though their conduct is so opposite, the end of both is alike. If there were no gain to be got, your true-speaking man would tell untruths as much as your liar, and your liar would tell the truth as much as your true-speaking man.

 

Darius I of Persia

 

I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going.

 

William Norman Birkett

 

What’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me- it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s has some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing but your own voice- your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and cunning of it’s own.

 

Ayn Rand

 

I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking.

 

Gerald Ford

 

I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking.

 

Jerry Ford