“ One doesn’t like to be cruel,—and yet one hates to lie. ”
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). copy citation

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“Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice as to his future course. What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth? One doesn’t like to be cruel,—and yet one hates to lie. Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism,—recommends study of good models,—that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,—and, above all that there should be no hurry in printing what is written.” source