was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of ours. — I wish I had been born in the Moon, or in any of the… - Laurence Sterne

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

Now don't let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them, — imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.

Y, en vuestro propio caso, recordad bien y meditad sobre esta sencilla distinción (no hacerla como es debido ha sido la perdición de miles): — que vuestra conciencia no es ley. —