Unleavened Bread

"Alas, it will be found... that in [America] more than in any country, our Public Life and our Private, our State and our Religion, and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what we think), is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of hypocrisies, conventionalisms, worn-out traditionary rags and cobwebs; such a life-garment of beggarly incredible and uncredited falsities as no honest souls of Adam's Posterity were ever enveloped in before. And we walk about in it with a stately gesture, as if it were some priestly stole or imperial mantle; not the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever was. 'No Englishman dare believe that truth,' says one: he stands, for these two hundred years, enveloped in lies of every kind; from the nadir to zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his life-element. He really thinks the truth dangerous. Poor wretch, you see him everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by taking the falsity along with it, and welding them together; this he calls 'safe course,' 'moderate course,' and other fine names; there, balanced between God and the Devil, he thinks he can serve two masters, and that things will go well with him.'"

---- Thomas Carlyle
"Latter Day Pamphlets"
No. IV. The New Downing Street
April 15, 1850