Hosea Ballou Quotes

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come to the ground

and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine

When you fail to tell the truth, you are kept bound to the past in ways that devastate your soul.

For the most part fraud in the end secures for its companions repentance and shame.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

President Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

The cover-up, more than the initial wrongdoing, is what is most likely to bring you down.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

He that trusts in a lie, shall perish in truth.

The higher the tower, the greater the fall thereof.

tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood.

Destiny is a tower of cards - nudge one just an inch and everything stacked on top comes crashing down. P116

When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

TRUTH may hurt temporarily, but LIES leave marks permanently.

The price of dishonesty is self-destruction.

Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.

If you cheat in the dark of the morning, you'll get found in the bright lights of the night.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

What Roman power slowly built, an unarmed traitor instantly overthrew.

You can be the smartest person in the world - which Bill Clinton is, and if he's not, his wife is - and care more than anybody else in the world - which he does, I don't doubt that for a minute. And you can care so much that you're willing to be dishonest - you can tell people one thing but do another because you really know it's for their own good. And you'll still screw it all up. Because the whole premise of what you're doing is wrong!

You cannot build a superstructure on a cracked foundation.