The three distinguished successes cited a moment ago in financial and
political life do not drink, smoke, or swear. Mark that latter
fact--they do not swear. I repeat again that this is no Sunday-school
lecture, but the plainest kind of a talk on practical methods of
success. The money you will lay aside in bank, or the property you
will accumulate, is one kind of an asset; but the respect of men, the
confidence of a community, is an asset also, and a more valuable one.
Very well. An oath never yet created respect for any man who used it.
Even men who are habitually profane always feel a contemptuous yet
pitying regret when they hear a foul word fall from a mouth they
expected to be clean. You want people you live among to believe in
you. They are not going to believe in you spontaneously. You are on
trial every day of your first few years among them. As you go in and
out among them they acquire a confidence in you which finally grows
into an unquestioning faith. Beware how you start, in the minds of men
whose good-will you must have, a question as to whether their good
opinion of you is justified or not. Profanity will create such a
question.
I remember having heard the most promising young lawyer in a certain
town swear in the presence of a conservative old banker who had begun
to "take the young man up" and was giving him some business.
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