Word: oaths
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Meaning of an Oath...
...truth, that a man is only as good as his word, still holds. I do not want to trust my life to anyone who will break a pledge for his own gain. The air controllers [Aug. 17] certainly knew what they were swearing to when they took the oath...
Some FBI agents nonetheless wanted to convene a grand jury in the hope that under oath some of the people named in the IRS reports might yield clues to Hoffa's fate. The Justice Department turned them down. Says one FBI agent: "Can you imagine the scene? Fitzsimmons, the Pressers, White House aides, Nixon Administration officials all trooping in; questions about Teamster campaign contributions and 'exchange targets'-it would have been a replay of Watergate. Nobody in the department wanted that." So the FBI investigation wound up last year without results, and the contents of the Daley...
...idea that morality is merely subjective has been subversive. Americans claim exemption under what might be called the Doctrine of Discontinuous Selves: if people are forever "growing" and "going through changes," then the man who swore the oath, say, three years ago, is not the same one now called upon to live up to it. This discontinuous series of new selves, emotionally different selves, scatters the mind. It makes for a short moral attention span...
...promises, contracts and oaths are the acts of will and intelligence and anticipation that make a society coherent, that hold it together. If they cannot be trusted, then the whole structure begins to wobble. If the air-traffic controllers do not care to recite Frost, they might consider William Murray, Britain's Solicitor General in the 18th century: "No country can subsist a twelvemonth where an oath is not thought binding, for the want of it must necessarily dissolve society." -By Lance Morrow