A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Appropriate

There is meaning and purpose in not surrendering in the face of

loss, but instead working to bind up wounds, ease pain,

and spare others what you have seen. Our ...

duty, is to ensure that something good comes from suffering, that we find some kind of gift in good-bye. Not to somehow, perversely, make the loss “worth it.”

Wonderful

not a joke. President George W. Bush needed to appoint a new United States

who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second

and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Humans tend to do the same dumb things, and the same evil things, again and again, because we forget.

Remember

Still, to avoid being paralyzed and crushed by second-guessing, I use a rule of thumb: if the criticism is coming from a person I know to be thoughtful, I pay close attention to it. I even pay attention to anonymous

critics and even savage partisans if their logic or factual presentation tell me they may be seeing something I missed. The rest of the

crazies, and there were a lot of craz...

A creed to live by!