Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies — people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.