Napoleon Hill

It then becomes necessary to examine carefully both the evidence submitted and the person from whom the evidence comes; and when the evidence is of such a nature that it affects the interest of the witness who is giving it, there will be reason to scrutinize it all the more carefully, as witnesses who have an interest in the evidence that they are submitting often yield to the temptation to color and pervert it to protect that interest.

If one man slanders another, his remarks should be accepted, if of any weight at all, with at least a grain of the proverbial salt of caution; for it is a common human tendency for men to find nothing but evil in those whom they do not like. The man who has attained to the degree of accurate thinking that enables him to speak of his enemy without exaggerating his faults, and minimizing his virtues, is the exception and not the rule. Some very able men have not yet risen above this vulgar and self-destructive habit of belittling their enemies, competitors and contemporaries.

I wish to bring this common tendency to your attention with all possible emphasis, because it is a tendency that is fatal to accurate thinking. Before you can become an accurate thinker, you must understand and make allowance for the fact that the moment a man or a woman begins to assume leadership in any walk of life, the slanderers begin to circulate rumors and subtle whisperings reflecting upon his or her character.

No matter how fine ones character is or what service he may be engaged in rendering to the world, he cannot escape the notice of those misguided people who delight in destroying instead of building.

Lincolns political enemies circulated the report that he lived with a colored woman. Washingtons political enemies circulated a similar report concerning him. Since both Lincoln and Washington were southern men, this report was undoubtedly regarded by those who circulated it as being at one and the same time the most fitting and degrading one they could imagine.

But we do not have to go back to our first President to find evidence of this slanderous nature with which men are gifted, for they went a step further, in paying their tributes to the late President Harding, and circulated the report that he had negro blood in his veins.

When Woodrow Wilson came back from Paris with what he believed to be a sound plan for abolishing war and settling international disputes, all except the accurate thinker might have been led to believe, by the reports of the they say chorus, that he was a combination of Nero and Judas Iscariot.