"He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other"
About this Quote
Bacon frames morality like a construction site: advice is labor, counsel-plus-example is craftsmanship, hypocrisy is sabotage. The genius is the bookkeeping. He’s not praising virtue in the abstract; he’s auditing influence. “Builds with one hand” concedes that words matter - persuasion can raise a wall. But “with both” makes the real claim: example is not decoration, it’s structural. You can’t outsource credibility to language and expect it to hold.
The last clause turns the aphorism into an accusation. “Good admonition and bad example” targets the preacher-politician type, the authority who keeps the right vocabulary while living the opposite. Bacon’s subtext is behavioral economics before the term existed: people learn less from what leaders recommend than from what they permit themselves. Hypocrisy doesn’t just fail to help; it actively cancels out the help by teaching the audience that rules are optional for the powerful.
Context sharpens the edge. Bacon was a court operator in a world where reputation, patronage, and public piety were currencies - and where moral instruction was often a performance. He also had skin in the game: a brilliant public intellect whose career ended in a corruption scandal. That biographical shadow doesn’t invalidate the line; it makes it stingier and more self-aware. The quote reads like a warning from inside the machine: your example will testify louder than your advice, and if the two disagree, the testimony becomes demolition.
The last clause turns the aphorism into an accusation. “Good admonition and bad example” targets the preacher-politician type, the authority who keeps the right vocabulary while living the opposite. Bacon’s subtext is behavioral economics before the term existed: people learn less from what leaders recommend than from what they permit themselves. Hypocrisy doesn’t just fail to help; it actively cancels out the help by teaching the audience that rules are optional for the powerful.
Context sharpens the edge. Bacon was a court operator in a world where reputation, patronage, and public piety were currencies - and where moral instruction was often a performance. He also had skin in the game: a brilliant public intellect whose career ended in a corruption scandal. That biographical shadow doesn’t invalidate the line; it makes it stingier and more self-aware. The quote reads like a warning from inside the machine: your example will testify louder than your advice, and if the two disagree, the testimony becomes demolition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
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