There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth
Interpretation
Truth should be prioritized over scandal, and one should not spread rumors without honesty.
This quote emphasizes the importance of truthfulness and integrity in communication. It suggests that while there may be circumstances where one might choose to withhold the truth to avoid causing a scandal, it is indefensible to share gossip or scandalous information without also being truthful. Essentially, it underlines that honesty is imperative, and misleading others with scandalous tales is unacceptable.
In practice
During a public speech about ethics in journalism, this quote can illustrate the duty of reporters to prioritize truth.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.
In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.
Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
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