“The Constitution is not a suicide pact”: Please Support WEJB/NSU!

The other day, I heard or read someone say that “As Attorney General Michael Mukasey said, ‘The Constitution is not a suicide pact.’”

That’s a great line, but the only problem is, it’s someone else’s line. AG Mukasey may have repeated it, but Supreme Justice Robert Jackson said it over 50 years earlier. Whether Justice Jackson coined the phrase, I do not know, but he certainly popularized it.

I guarantee you that AG Mukasey knew full well that he was quoting Justice Jackson, but the big-deal journalist who botched the attribution had no idea what he was talking about.

On the Web, misattribution of quotations, or the deliberate piping of (false) quotes is the rule. But not at WEJB/NSU. We take great pains to get the big and small things right.

Many of our readers already knew who the right speaker was, but not everyone.

My reader-researchers and I remember what it was like to live in a country where tens of millions of people knew such quotes by heart, and gave proper attribution. A country where we had well-read truck drivers, rather than semi-literate, dishonest Ivy League professors.

Please hit the “Donate” icon at the top of the page, and make a generous contribution (i.e., whatever you can afford) to WEJB/NSU.

I thank you, and your posterity will, too.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix