Time & Perspective Quote by Jon Carroll

Certainty is the tell, and Jon Carroll knows it. He takes the warm, self-congratulatory phrase "on the side of the angels" and quietly detonates it by reminding you that angels are a human invention. That move flips the moral hierarchy: instead of measuring ourselves against some clean, external goodness, we’re forced to confront that our purest symbols are made by the same species that lies, forgets, scapegoats, and edits its own memory.

The intent isn’t to sneer at faith so much as to puncture the rhetorical cheat code of righteousness. People invoke angels to launder their motives, to borrow authority they haven’t earned. Carroll’s skepticism is aimed at the performance of moral certainty, not at morality itself. He’s warning that the loudest moral confidence often depends on an unexamined premise: that your definition of "good" is timeless, neutral, and somehow not contaminated by politics, ego, or tribal loyalty.

The subtext is journalistic in the best sense: distrust claims that can’t be audited. "Famous for being frequently untrustworthy" lands like a deadpan footnote about human nature, and the dangling "and occasional" (whether intentional or truncated) feels eerily apt, as if he can’t even promise consistency in our failures. Read in the context of culture-war argument, activism, or punditry, it’s a reminder that moral language is powerful precisely because it can be used to shut down thinking. Carroll asks you to keep thinking anyway, especially when someone insists they’ve outsourced their conscience to heaven.