“If you can't be a good example, then be a terrible warning.”
Variant: If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
-Gwen Goodnight
Source: Faking It
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Jennifer Crusie 38
American writer 1949Related quotes
“Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”
Source: After You'd Gone
“The United States is…a warning rather than an example to the world.”
To the twenty-fifth-anniversary meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1857)
1850s
This quote was already published in 1853 http://books.google.com/books?id=LM0QVhkWKrcC&pg=PA129&dq=%22two+eyes+are+geography+and+chronology.%22#v=onepage&q=%22two%20eyes%20are%20geography%20and%20chronology.%22&f=false, when Garfield was only 22.
Misattributed
“If I can't serve as a role model, let me serve as a warning.”
Robert Harris, "The Making of Neil Kinnock" (Faber and Faber, 1984), page 208.
Speech in Bridgend, Glamorgan, on Tuesday 7 June 1983. Thursday 9 June 1983 was polling day in the general election.
Context: If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old.
Plutarch, Moralia, 74C
Quoted by Plutarch