This has sometimes been misquoted as: If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the decency to betray my country.
What I Believe (1938)
Source: What I Believe and Other Essays
"A Letter To My Fellow Countrymen", Tribune (18 August 1961)
“Brother, even by my mother's dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.”
Act I, sc. iii.
Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629-33?)
Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)
As quoted in Riccardo Orizio, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, (Walker and Company, 2003), p. 150
Upon hearing (in December 1839) that he had been rejected in favor of William Henry Harrison as the Whig Party nominee for President in the election of 1840.
Quoted by Henry A. Wise, who claimed to have heard it firsthand, in Seven Decades of the Union (1872), ch. VI.
As quoted in Gérard de Villiers (1975), The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography, page 259
Attributed
“If you betray me, can I take a better revenge
Than to love the person you hate?”
Me puis-je mieux venger, si vous me trahissez,
Que d'aimer à vos yeux ce que vous haïssez?
Domitien, act IV, scene iii.
Tite et Bérénice (Titus and Berenice) (1670)
“America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.”
Dexter Filkins, " Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2006/11/05/magazine/1154652190060.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q268tpwQ3DQ26emcQ3DtpwQ26pagewantedQ3Dprint&OP=7b29a451Q2Fvqfdv_gQ20KK_vmQ20fuQ5EfqvVQ2FQ2FJvQ7DQ7DvQ2FevTQ7CpQ7CQ5CQ5EQ7BfvQ7DQ7DeGJeVQ7DyQ2FQ2FJQ2F!i_TQ3C", New York Times Magazine, November 5, 2006.
The Age for Love
Context: I bore with the ill-humor of my chief. What would he have said if he had known that I had in my pocket an interview and in my head an anecdote which were material for a most successful story? And he has never had either the interview or the story. Since then I have made my way in the line where he said I should fail. I have lost my innocent look and I earn my thirty thousand francs a year, and more. I have never had the same pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit to Nemours. I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I wanted to, since, with all my laborious work I have never written a book. And yet when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented me from committing toward a dearly loved master a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, "If you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it." And this is the reason, now that Fauchery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has come for me to relate my first interview. There is none of which I am more proud.
