“Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Not Burke but Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858).
Misattributed
“Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk
Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), pp. 78-79
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
On Napoleon; Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book".
1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)
“God, who has given me so many Kingdoms to govern, has not given me a son fit to govern them.”
Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) King of Spain who became King of England by marriage to Queen Mary I
David Maland, Europe in the seventeenth century (1966), p. 207.
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author
Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 14 : Vega-Born
Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)
Context: Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society. But the spinning-wheel and the loom, which had given employment to women, had been superseded by machinery, and something else had to take their places. The taking care of the house and children, and the family sewing, and teaching the little summer school at a dollar per week, could not supply the needs nor fill the aspirations of women. But every departure from these conceded things was met with the cry, "You want to get out of your sphere," or, "To take women out of their sphere;" and that was to fly in the face of Providence, to unsex yourself in short, to be monstrous women, women who, while they orated in public, wanted men to rock the cradle and wash the dishes. We pleaded that whatever was fit to be done at all might with propriety be done by anybody who did it well; that the tools belonged to those who could use them; that the possession of a power presupposed a right to its use.
Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists
Excerpt from Beyond the Pale by Nicholas Mosley.