Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
Interpretation
Just because someone has power doesn't mean they are right.
This quote by Samuel Johnson suggests that authority or power does not inherently validate a person's beliefs or assertions. It serves as a warning against accepting claims or ideas solely based on the status of the individual presenting them, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking and discernment in evaluating the truth.
In practice
In a debate on ethics, one might use this quote to emphasize that moral positions should not be based on someone's power.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
For many decades - and this was reinforced by the broadcast networks' standards-and-practices department - bad guys on TV had to get their comeuppance, and good guys had to be brave and true and unconflicted. Those were the laws of the business.
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.
I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
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