Life & Wisdom Quote by John Harington

A warning disguised as common sense, Harington’s line treats privacy not as a virtue but as a liability. The triad of “confessor, lawyer and physician” sketches three medieval-to-early-modern authorities who can either save you or ruin you, depending on what you withhold. Each trades in a different kind of secrecy: sin, crime, and sickness. Bundle them together and you get a compact theory of the self in a society where the body, the soul, and the law are tightly policed and tightly intertwined.

The imperative voice matters: “hide not your case on no condition” is almost prosecutorial. Harington isn’t celebrating transparency as a moral ideal; he’s selling disclosure as a survival tactic. The word “case” is doing double duty, sounding medical and legal at once, implying that your life is already being processed by institutions. Your job is to give the professionals usable information before your situation metastasizes into scandal, sentence, or death.

In context, this comes from a writer known for epigram and bite, and it lands like a cynical proverb from inside the system. Early modern England was a culture of reputation, confession, and patronage, where rumors traveled faster than remedies. The subtext is less “trust authority” than “don’t be naive about how authority works.” If you’re going to submit to these gatekeepers, submit fully; half-truths don’t protect you, they just make you harder to help and easier to judge.