Advocate Profession Quotes

So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of ‘truth

[you’ll acquire] A certain amount of cynicism. This business works on you. When you were in law school you had some noble idea what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize you were nothing but hired guns. Mouthpieces for sale to the highest bidder, available to anybody, any crook, any sleazebag with enough money to pay your outrageous fees. Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job. Yeah Mitch, you’ll get cynical. And it’s sad, really.

When the topic turns to Palestine, the same people who consistently advocate for freedom and justice fail to live up to their professed ideals.

When you were in law school you had some noble idea of what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize we’re nothing but hired guns. Mouthpieces for sale to the highest bidder, available to anybody, any crook, any sleazebag with enough money to pay our outrageous fees. Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job. Yeah, Mitch, you’ll get cynical. And it’s sad, really.

Observe the nature of today’s alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism tocommunism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed. Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today’s alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate—in the name of love for humanity.

There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device.

These US doctors are trained to cut you and write prescriptions. That is all. They don't know a thing about healing you. They treat symptoms, not causes. Like other professionals, they're working to buy their homes and send their kids to Harvard. That doesn't mean they don't care about your wellness, or that they're not good at diagnosing, and some of their treatments are excellent and should be followed. But before you let anyone go sticking a knife or needle in you, you've got to investigate. You've got to be sure you know what's happening with your body. You've got to advocate for yourself and your loved ones.

The popular media and conventional wisdom, including the medical profession's traditional approach to nutrition, have created and continue to perpetuate this problem through inadequate, outdated dietary counseling. Attempts to universalize dietary therapies so that one-diet-fits-all influences the flawed claims against meats and fats, thereby encouraging overconsumption of grains. Government-sponsored guides to healthy eating, such as the USDA's food pyramid, which advocates six to eleven servings of grains daily for everyone, lag far behind current research and continue to preach dangerously old-fashioned ideas. Because the USDA's function is largely the promotion of agriculture and agricultural products, there is a clear conflict of interest inherent in any USDA claim of healthful benefits arising from any agricultural product. Popular beliefs and politically motivated promotion, not science, continue to dictate dietary recommendations, leading to debilitating and deadly diseases that are wholly or partly preventable.

My uncle had an idea of his being educated as an advocate, that through his interest he might become a judge. But, besides that he is not at all fitted for such an occupation, it is certainly more creditable to cultivate the earth for the sustenance of man, than to be the confidant, and sometimes the accomplice, of his vices; which is the profession of a lawyer.

Real Estate: A lot like the legal profession, people want an advocate. So they need to know that YOU are in THEIR corner. Real estate is one of those fields where the laws are different everywhere and always changing. The confusion makes it such that the average citizen cannot properly advocate for himself or herself. They need an expert. And while they may say that they want to get a great price, what they REALLY want is an expert in their corner fighting for them. You are really selling that hero.

A farmer’s is a very healthy happy life; and the least hurtful, or rather the most beneficial profession of any. My uncle had an idea of his being educated as an advocate, that through his interest he might become a judge. But, besides that he is not at all fitted for such an occupation, it is certainly more creditable to cultivate the earth for the sustenance of man, than to be the confidant, and sometimes the accomplice, of his vices; which is the profession of a lawyer. I said, that the employments of a prosperous farmer, if they were not a more honourable, they were at least a happier species of occupation than that of a judge, whose misfortune it was always to meddle with the dark side of human nature.

Now here is exactly the point, I am afraid, where multitudes of English people fail, and are in imminent danger of being lost for ever. They know that there is no forgiveness of sin excepting in Christ Jesus. They can tell you that there is no Saviour for sinners, no Redeemer, no Mediator, excepting Him who was born of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, and buried. But here they stop, and get no further! They never come to the point of actually laying hold on Christ by faith, and becoming one with Christ and Christ in them. They can say, He is a Saviour, but not 'my Saviour,'—a Redeemer, but not 'my Redeemer,'—a Priest, but not 'my Priest,'—an Advocate, but not 'my Advocate:' and so they live and die unforgiven! No wonder that Martin Luther said, "Many are lost because they cannot use possessive pronouns.

September 1995: Mark and I had our well documented book entitled TRANCE Formation of America published, complete with irrefutable graphic details which are in themselves evidence to present to Congress, all factions of law enforcement including the FBI, CIA, DIA, DEA, TBI, NSA, etc., all major news media groups, national and international human rights advocates, both American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, the National Institute of Mental Health, and more… to no avail. TRANCE thoroughly exposes many of the perpe-TRAITORS and their agenda replete with names, which raises the question “why haven't we been sued?” The obvious answer is that the same “National Security Act” that continues to block our access to all avenues of justice and public exposure also prevents these criminals from inevitably bringing mind control to light through court procedures, an opportunity we would welcome. Meanwhile, as reported by both APAs, survivors of U.S. Government sponsored mind control began to surface all across our nation. The first to encounter the vast number of survivors were law enforcement and mental health professionals, and these professionals began to ask questions. in other countries, answers are being provided through somewhat less controlled media, reflecting the CIA's involvement in Project MK Ultra human rights atrocities. A television documentary entitled The Sleep Room aired across Canada by the Canadian Broadcast Corp. in the spring of 1998. Dr. Martin Orne, an associate boasted by Dr. William Mitchell M.D., Ph.D. who thrust Kelly into Vanderbilt's cover-up attempt (re: p.14), is named as an accomplice to Dr. Ewing Cameron's MK Ultra 'experiments' in Montreal, Quebec. Additionally, it should be known that Dr. Cameron went on to found the American Psychiatric Association, which has helped to maintain America's mental health profession in the dark ages of information control.

Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

In 1935, seven years before the Nazis fully implemented the Final Solution, Hitler advocated emigration and ghettoization as interim solutions to the Jewish problem. The Jews, Hitler said, must be “removed from all professions, ghettoized, restricted to a particular territory, where they can wander about, in accordance with their character, while the German people looks in, as one looks at animals in the wild.”30

From the perspective of these debates, the Enlightenment no longer appears exclusively secular either in its origins or orientation. On the contrary, it was as much a movement within theology as a reaction against it. Every thinker writing about the self during the period—even self-professed atheists—formed his views with theological questions in mind. At the conceptual level, moreover, the affinities shared by mystics and materialists in their elaborations of the dispossessed self reveal another aspect of the secularization process. Unlike defenders of self-ownership, whose growing perception of divine transcendence compelled them to stress the fundamental autonomy of the human person, advocates of dispossession invoked God and nature as immanent, totalizing forces with absolute dominion over the self. Their efforts to resacralize the world culminated in the French Revolution, when politicians and citizens alike devoted themselves to self- sacrifice for the patrie—a polity that in their eyes radiated the authority of natural and divine law combined with the people’s indivisible will.

Once upon a time there was a standard. It gave us men rich in thought - but all is trodden underfoot by a swinish multitude. Every area of intellectual endeavor is tainted. Over 120 years ago the historian of European morals, William Lecky, praised Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) for honesty and seriousness. Lecky said that although Carlyle was a very poor man for many years, he never sought wealth by advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by veiling [his] most unpalatable beliefs. According to Lecky, Carlyle's standard of truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere professions. Lecky tells us that Carlyle used to speak of men who 'played false with their intellects'; or, in other words, turned away their minds from unwelcome truths and by allowing their wishes or interests to sway their judgments, persuaded or half-persuaded themselves to believe whatever they wished. A firm grasp of facts, he maintained, was the first characteristic of an honest mind; the main element in all honest, intellectual work. J.R.Nyquist

THE MARTYR AND THE CHAIN. "When Hooper, the blessed martyr, was at the stake, and the officers came to fasten him to it, he cried, 'Let me alone; God that hath called me hither will keep me from stirring; and yet,' said he, upon second thought, ' because I am but flesh and blood, I am willing. Bind me fast, lest I stir.'" John Hooper (1495-1500 – 1555) was an Anglican English Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. An advocate of the English Reformation, he was martyred during the Marian Persecutions. Some plead that they have no need of the holdfasts of an outward profession, and the solemn pledges of the two great ordinances, for the Holy Spirit will keep them faithful; yet surely, like this man of God, they may well accept those cords of love wherewith heavenly wisdom would bind us to the horns of the altar. Our infirmities need all the helps which divine love has devised and we may not be so self-sufficient as to refuse them. Pledges, covenants, and vows of human devising should be used with great caution; but where the Lord ordains, we may proceed without question, our only fear being lest by neglecting them we should despise the command of the Lord, or by relying upon them we should wrest the precept from its proper intent. Whatever will prove a check to us when tempted, or an incentive when commanded, must be of use to us, however strong we may conceive ourselves to be. "Bind the sacrifice with cords, even with cords to the horns of the altar." Lord, cast a fresh band about me every day. Let the constraining love of Jesus hold me faster and faster. "Oh, to grace how great a debtor, Daily I'm constrained to be!  Let that grace, Lord, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to thee.

And even now, these elite justice advocates celebrated their own virtue, and the shared presumption of their superior morality, without seeming to notice that they had become — in less than a year — exactly what they had spent their adult lives professing most to hate.

If what we advocate in this handbook is so good and has such a significant impact on how officers perform on the street, then why is it not common across law enforcement agencies? Because, it’s the culture, stupid! Cultures are unique to each organization and/or profession. These cultures take shape over time, eventually becoming so entrenched that people resist any change, even change that is positive and valuable to the organization. Many organizations get stuck by the current way they do things, simply because it’s the way they have always done it. They resist mainly because they fear losing something such as traditional methods of training, or operating how they have learned and developed over their careers. They fear they will lose control of their influence, their authority or prestige within the organization, and potentially their positions or jobs. Much of this is ego and individually driven and entirely self-serving, just hiding behind a smokescreen of leadership.

This is not all. We are prepared to go farther than to love in word and in tongue. There is not one who is called to advocate any article of revealed truth, who will not find a Reformed Presbyterian ready to stand by him and support him, though he may have been in keen controversy with him yesterday, and may be tomorrow. No denominational jealousy shall ever come over the spirit of a true Covenanter, to blind him to the preeminent claims of truth over all sectional interests. About forty years ago, there was a public, a protracted, and an ardent controversy, between the priests of Rome, and the ministers of the Irish Episcopal Church. In conversation with an Episcopal Clergyman, who complained of other Protestant bodies giving them the cold shoulder, I said, we are strongly attached to our own distinguishing profession, but I do not think any of our ministers are capable of looking, without interest, on your argument. He turned full before me and replied, "We never meet with a Covenanter but we meet with a friend." I would not own for a leal-hearted Cameronian one who, in like circumstances, could not extort a like testimony. I don’t know which is more contemptible, the man who would turn away from even an enemy in difficulties, and the man who could forfeit his own good opinion for the sake of any man’s friendship.

Anti–Second Amendment advocates profess to love science while demonizing people of faith, but you’d never know this by their arguments. Bloomberg PR exec/mom Shannon Watts-Troughton once told me via Twitter that “an assault weapon enables humans to shoot 10 rounds in one minute. @blueelephant69: @shannonrwatts @DLoesch.” What in flat-earthing hell is this? I can throw ten bowling balls a minute, I have assault arms, ban them. By her estimation, “assault weapons” are any firearms that can shoot ten rounds per minute, which is every firearm. Even a bolt action rifle can shoot ten rounds per minute. That

First, while the church shouldn’t affirm homosexual activity (or adultery, idolatry, or greed, for that matter), it should welcome anyone—gays included—to discover who God is and to find his forgiveness.5 Lots of people wear WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets and T-shirts, but they don’t treat homosexuals as Jesus would. He wouldn’t react in fear or avoid them; he would welcome them, sit with them, and tell them of God’s deep interest in them. Many churches treat homosexuals as modern-day lepers—as outcasts; but Jesus came to heal, help, and set all people free to live for God. Surely churches can welcome gays without condoning their lifestyle—just as they can receive adulterers and alcoholics. As my pastor, Bill Stepp, regularly says, “God accepts you the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you as you are.” It’s strange that professing Christians single out homosexual activity as the most wicked of sins. Often those who claim to be saved by God’s grace are amazingly judgmental, hateful, and demeaning (calling homosexual persons “fairies” or “faggots”) rather than being compassionate and embracing. Professing Christians are often harder on homosexuals outside the church than they are with the immorality within the church (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–13). New Testament scholar Bruce Winter writes with a prophetic voice, “The ease with which the present day church often passes judgment on the ethical or structural misconduct of the outside community is at times matched only by its reluctance to take action to remedy the ethical conduct of its own members.”6 Second, the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexual inclinations, but rather sexual activity outside of a marriage relationship between husband and wife. In fact, no writers of antiquity, including biblical ones, had any idea of “sexual orientation”; they talked about sexual behavior. When the Scriptures speak against immoral sexual relationships, the focus is not on inclinations or feelings (whether homosexual or heterosexual).7 Rather, the focus is on acting out those impulses (which ranges from inappropriately dwelling on sexual thoughts—lusting—to carrying them out sexually). Even though we are born with a sinful, self-centered inclination, God judges us based on what we do.8 Similarly, a person may, for whatever reasons, have same-sex inclinations, but God won’t judge him on the basis of those inclinations, but on what he does with them. A common argument made by advocates of a gay lifestyle is that the Bible doesn’t condemn loving, committed same-sex relationships (“covenant homosexuality”)—just homosexual rape or going against one’s natural sexual inclination, whether hetero- or homosexual. Now, “the Bible doesn’t say anything about ——” or “Jesus never said anything about ——” arguments can be tricky and even misleading. The Bible doesn’t speak about abortion, euthanasia, political involvement, Christians fighting in the military, and the like. Jesus, as far as we know, never said anything about rape or child abuse. Nevertheless, we can get guidance from Scripture’s more basic affirmations about our roles as God’s image-bearers, about God’s creation design, and about our identity and redemption in Christ, as we’ll see below.

It’s called a ‘bar,’ and it’s a wooden barrier used to separate the two parts of the courtroom. Apart from the parties in a case and any witnesses, only the lawyers may literally pass the bar. Have you ever noticed that even the court personnel and jury members usually enter through separate doors? That’s the reason the term ‘the bar’ has come to refer to the legal profession as a whole.

I by no means advocate a practice of Christianity in isolation; all Christianity even that of the hermit-is a "social Christianity," but that is only as context, not as end. The Church is in society because men are in society, but the end of the Church is the transformation of men, not society. It is a good thing if a society and government profess genuine Christianity, if its institutions are informed by Christianity, because an example is given thereby to the men who are a part of that society; but a Christian society is not an end in itself, but simply a result of the fact that Christian men live in society

They also shaped steep internal ladders within each profession, differentiating the corporate lawyer from the courtroom advocate, the administrator from the teacher, and the executive from the low-level manager.

Advocates for universal public education, called common schoolers, were challenged by antitax activists. The détente between these two groups redefined American teaching as low-paid (or even volunteer) missionary work for women,

From that position he pushed for national medical insurance, which the medical profession then advocated, and in 1916 he became president of the American Medical Association. In his presidential address he declared, “There are unmistakable signs that health insurance will constitute the next great step in social legislation.

When the kingdom is manifested, it's rather obvious. It doesn't look like a church building. It doesn't necessarily look like a group of religious people professing certain things - including the profession that they are Christian. It doesn't necessarily look like a gather of people advocating the right political or ethical causes. It doesn't look like a group who are - or who at least believe themselves to be - morally superior to others, telling them how they should live. It doesn't look like a group using swords, however righteous they believe their sword-wielding to be. It rather looks like people individually and collectively mimicking God. It looks like Calvary. It looks Christian, whether it identifies itself as such or not. When people are 'coming under' others to love and serve them, without regard to how much or how little those others deserve it, and without regard for their own interests and reputation, the kingdom of God has come.

homosexuality a curable perversion. She professed to disdain men and insisted women had been “enslaved by the institution of marriage.” Yet she loved many men and married twice: she treated her first husband abominably, and was physically and emotionally abused by her second. She considered sex degrading, but was an enthusiastic advocate, and energetic exponent, of free love. “Out here I’ve had chances to sleep with all colours and shapes,” she wrote to a friend, shortly before meeting Ursula. “One French gunrunner, short and round and bumpy; one fifty-year-old monarchist German who believes in the dominating role of the penis in influencing women; one high Chinese official whose actions I’m ashamed to describe, one round left-wing Kuomintang man who was soft and slobbery.” She was a communist who never joined the party; a violent revolutionary and romantic dreamer; a feminist in thrall to a succession of men; a woman who inspired intense loyalty, yet inflicted enormous damage on many of her friends; she supported communism without considering what communist rule involved in reality. She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising. “I may not be innocent, but I’m right,” she declared. Ursula was entranced. Agnes Smedley seemed to embody political passion and energy, the very antithesis of the smug complacency she found in the bourgeois boudoirs of Shanghai. “Your very existence is not worth anything at all if you live passively in the midst of injustice,” Smedley insisted. Agnes was everything Ursula admired: feminist, anti-fascist, an enemy of imperialism and defender of the oppressed against the forces of capitalism, and a natural revolutionary. She was also a spy.

Once upon a time there was a standard. It gave us men rich in thought - but all is trodden underfoot by a swinish multitude. Every area of intellectual endeavor is tainted. Over 120 years ago the historian of European morals, William Lecky, praised Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) for honesty and seriousness. Lecky said that although Carlyle was a very poor man for many years, he never sought wealth by advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by veiling [his] most unpalatable beliefs. According to Lecky, Carlyle's standard of truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere professions. Lecky tells us that Carlyle used to speak of men who 'played false with their intellects'; or, in other words, turned away their minds from unwelcome truths and by allowing their wishes or interests to sway their judgments, persuaded or half-persuaded themselves to believe whatever they wished. A firm grasp of facts, he maintained, was the first characteristic of an honest mind; the main element in all honest, intellectual work.