[39]
And there is clearly far more justification for lying when it is a question of diverting
an assassin from his victim or deceiving an enemy
to save our country. Consequently a practice which
is at times reprehensible even in slaves, may on
other occasions be praiseworthy even in a wise man.
If this be granted, I can see that there will be many
possible emergencies such as to justify an orator in
undertaking cases of a kind which, in the absence of
any honourable reason, he would have refused to
touch.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.