Daily Inspiration Quote by Victoria Toensing

Toensing’s line is less a neutral legal primer than a strategic reminder about how power protects itself in court. On the surface, she’s stating a basic prosecutorial reality: perjury is notoriously hard to prove because the alleged lie often lives inside a closed conversation, and criminal standards demand more than competing narratives. But the real work of the quote is rhetorical. It converts a moral question (did someone lie under oath?) into an evidentiary obstacle course, shifting attention from credibility and motive to the colder language of “corroborating evidence.” That move matters because perjury allegations tend to erupt in politically radioactive settings where witnesses are polished, records are partial, and the public wants a clean villain.

The phrase “You just don’t go on ‘he said-she said’” is doing double duty. It sounds like common sense, but it also preemptively diminishes testimony itself, framing personal account as inherently flimsy unless backed by paper trails, third-party witnesses, or contemporaneous documents. In an era when many pivotal exchanges happen verbally (and off the record by design), that standard can function as both a safeguard against wrongful conviction and a shield for sophisticated actors who understand how to avoid leaving evidence.

Contextually, lawyers like Toensing often speak this way when commenting on high-profile investigations: the goal is to cool the public’s appetite for prosecution by emphasizing burden of proof. Subtext: absent a smoking gun, the case is “tough” not because the truth is unknowable, but because the system is built to demand more than truthiness.