
An-Nawawi's "Forty Hadith," Hadith 27
Sunni Hadith
Maxim 207
Sentences
Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.
An-Nawawi's "Forty Hadith," Hadith 27
Sunni Hadith
Source: Generation of Vipers (1942), p. 104
Context: Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light.
“What has that wretched damsel left to boast,
What good on earth, whose virtuous praise is lost?”
Book VIII, line 285
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)
Last words, as quoted in John Gibson Lockhart Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Vol. VII (1838), p. 294
Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (1988), Prologue: Are Economists Good People?