Perjury

"Qui semel a veritate deflexit, hic non majore religione ad perjurium quam ad mendacium perduci consuevit."

"It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine that they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances of a given case, and the surest check, often the only check, on such perjury, is to recognize the impossibility that men of larger instruction and resources and experience could have been guilty of such conduct."

"And hast thou sworn on every slight, pretence, Till perjuries are common as bad pence, While thousands, careless of the damning sin, Kiss the book's outside, who ne'er look'd within?"

"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery."

"I think it is a canon, which any one who is familiar with Courts of justice will recognise as a just one, that instead of assuming that people are perjuring themselves, you should, if there is a view by which you can reconcile all the testimony, prefer that to the view which places people in the position of contradicting each other, so that they must necessarily be swearing what is false. . . . The point as to having seen the witnesses and having had an opportunity of judging whether they were speaking the truth or not is generally a very powerful one."

"We can judge only from appearances, and from the evidence produced to us."

"[W]e better know there is fire whence we see much smoke rising than we could know it by one or two witnesses swearing to it. The witnesses may commit perjury, but the smoke cannot."

"My suit has nothing to do with the assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbor. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannæ, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllæ, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats."

"Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum."

"An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven: Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? No, not for Venice."

"Nec iurare time: veneris periuria venti inrita per terras et freta summa ferunt. gratia magna Iovi: vetuit Pater ipse valere, iurasset cupide quidquid ineptus amor."