This article was updated on 21 October 2024.
In a materialistic world, honesty is not a common virtue. Don’t expect to find it in abundance in shipping, where folks often burnish the truth, tell half-truths, and engage in all sorts of dishonesty. There’s a whole army of them: shipowners who use flags of convenience to avoid regulations and hire cheaper crews; manning agents who skim money from seafarers’ remittances; journalists who filch stories written by others; maritime charities that magnify the problem of depression at sea to get more donations; and IMO bureaucrats who pay empty tributes to seafarers, among others.
Hopefully, the following quotes will remind everyone of the value of honesty in a world where it is easier and more convenient to be dishonest
Truth and Honesty
To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (between 1599 and 1601)
To seem better to people, to myself, to God; to deceive everyone. No! now I won’t descend to that. I’ll be bad; but anyway not a liar, a cheat.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1901 translated by Constance Garnett)
I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere…Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.
— John Quincy Adams, Quote Junkie “Words To Live By” Edition, The Hagopian Institute, LLC (2008)
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (1959)
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
— Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (1762)
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
— John Ruskin, Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne (1867)
We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1907)
Lies and Deception
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
— Sir Walter Scott, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1888)
We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of
misunderstanding.
— Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1891)
By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.
— Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964)
Him do I hate even as the gates of hell who says one thing while he hides another in his heart.
— Homer, The Iliad of Homer by Samuel Butler (1898)
Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)
A statesman is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home’ and drink your beer
And let the neighbours’ vote…
— William Butler Yeats, ‘The Old Stone Cross’, New Poems (1938)
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
— H.L. Mencken, quoted in The Smart Set: The Aristocrat Among Magazines, Volume 68, Number 4 (August 1922)
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love…
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (translation by Constance Garnett, 2005)
~ Barista Uno
