Oscar Wilde Quotes
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
Wilde, Oscar. "The Decay of Lying." Intentions, James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891, p. 53.
After the Constitution had been ratified, there was a concerted attempt on the part of the Southern Slave States to minimize the importance of the Declaration of Independence. They feared that the equality principle in the Declaration should be seen by Americans as desirable policy which clearly meant slavery was untenable. There were three approaches all used by the Southerners. First, they tried to make it clear that the Declaration had no weight in American law or moral principles as it was superseded by the Constitution. Second, they claimed that it could only have applied to white men as Black males were not really men. Third, that the statement was patently false. This quotation illustrates the latter.
See Ben Franklin for an earlier similar sentiment {465143}.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
