Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle’s line lands like a polite cough in the middle of a scandal: not a denial of truth, but a warning about what truth does once it’s loose in public. “Suppressed” is the provocative word here, yet he immediately offers the softer alternative - “a just sense of proportion” - as if to say the real danger isn’t facts, it’s frenzy. This is the voice of a writer who understood that information doesn’t arrive as pure light; it arrives as story, selected and framed, and therefore capable of distorting as easily as it reveals.

The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial: keep the record from becoming a weapon. Doyle lived in a late-Victorian/Edwardian culture obsessed with propriety, reputation, and the social consequences of exposure. He also built his career on detective logic, which makes this counsel feel deliciously paradoxical: the man famous for elevating evidence is reminding us that evidence without context becomes its own kind of lie. The subtext is a critique of sensationalism - the tabloid impulse to treat every scrap of reality as equally urgent, equally damning, equally marketable.

There’s also an ethical claim smuggled in: “just” proportion implies moral judgment, not mere balance. Who decides what counts as proportionate? Editors, institutions, “responsible” narrators - the very people who benefit from controlling the frame. Read now, it sounds like an early sketch of our modern problem: an abundance of facts, a shortage of calibration. Doyle isn’t asking us to abandon truth; he’s asking us to respect the hierarchy of relevance, and to admit that disclosure is never neutral.