Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes
Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.
Lavater, Johann Caspar. Aphorisms on Man. Translated by Henry Fuseli, J. Johnson, 1788, p. 91.
CREEP in the Nixon Campaign
Indeed his valet was a spy who worked for the British. However, Franklin assumed that European courts and capitals were filled with spies, and instead of trying constantly to ferret them out, he made sure that he never allowed anyone to know what he wanted to keep secret. While Jefferson essentially adopted the same viewpoint, John Adams, much more uptight and rigid, was very distressed with Franklin over their differences in counter-espionage strategy. In reality, no secrets ever leaked back to England, but their spies sent some of the most absurd reports of the “evil” Dr. Franklin. He was designing a huge set of lenses that could be pointed at the British fleet in the Channel, magnify the rays of the sun and set the ships ablaze. Another had Franklin designing a chain that would be stretched from France to England and an electric current transmitted thereupon causing the English island to blow up. These reports made Franklin and the French the first who were feared for their plans to design and deploy weapons of mass destruction.
Johann Kaspar (or Caspar) Lavater was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian.
