#timon

Not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: Look at my present life and then at my former life, and you will see that I do attempt to carry them out. It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian precepts], and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. Teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help me and I will fulfill them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfill them. Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: “Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!” No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#encouragement #hypocrisy #testimony #life

When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#beatification #canonisation #deacons #devil #devil-s-advocate

The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way—that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony. ↗

— James Taranto

#jerks #meanness #nastiness #sanctimony #the-guardian

I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done. ↗

— Jack Ruby

#been #certain #done #happening #i

I'm convinced from what I know of Vernon Bundy that his testimony was truthful. ↗

— Jim Garrison

#convinced #his #i #know #testimony

There are, in the King case in particular, e names of confidential informants, persons to whom we promised confidentiality in return for their testimony. We have put their testimony in the public domain, but feel that their names should continue to be anonymous. ↗

— Louis Stokes

#case #confidential #confidentiality #continue #domain

At the request of the special counsel, Mr. Rove will not discuss the substance of his testimony. ↗

— Robert Luskin

#discuss #his #mr #request #rove

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated. ↗

— Franjo Tudjman

#biased #both #crimes #data #dead

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy. ↗

— Ralph Thomas Walker

#completely #i #sanctimonious #scorn #shoddy

I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it? ↗

— Margaret Mahy

#timon #timon-and-eden #beauty