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Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.

Richard Whately

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Richard Whately
Age: 76 †
Born: 1787
Born: February 1
Died: 1863
Died: October 8
Economist
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
London
England
Wishes
Side
Sides
Wish
Everyone
Truth

More quotes by Richard Whately

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It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
Richard Whately
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Some persons follow the dictates of their conscience only in the same sense in which a coachman may be said to follow the horses he is driving.
Richard Whately
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Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.
Richard Whately
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The more secure we feel against our liability to any error to which, in fact, we are liable, the greater must be our danger of falling into it.
Richard Whately
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To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.
Richard Whately
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All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
Richard Whately
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Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.
Richard Whately
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It may be worth noticing as a curious circumstance, when persons past forty before they were at all acquainted form together a very close intimacy of friendship. For grafts of old wood to take, there must be a wonderful congeniality between the trees.
Richard Whately
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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
Richard Whately
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Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth but either should set us upon testing ourselves.
Richard Whately
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Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.
Richard Whately
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He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
Richard Whately
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It is a good plan, with a young person of a character to be much affected by ludicrous and absurd representations, to show him plainly by examples that there is nothing which may not be thus represented. He will hardly need to be told that everything is not a mere joke.
Richard Whately
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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
Richard Whately
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To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.
Richard Whately
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He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.
Richard Whately
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A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
Richard Whately
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Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
Richard Whately
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Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
Richard Whately
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As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.
Richard Whately