"The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth"
About this Quote
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the Victorian-era instinct to protect respectability at all costs. Allen, writing in the early self-help and New Thought milieu, treats the self as something you can train into integrity, not something you curate into attractiveness. “Errors and shortcomings” aren’t framed as shameful stains; they’re raw data. The danger is not having them, but investing energy in concealment. Hiding becomes a kind of counter-spirituality: a commitment to illusion that disqualifies you from the larger project.
What makes the line work rhetorically is its inversion of what most people fear. Public exposure feels like punishment; Allen reframes it as initiation. The image of defects being surfaced suggests excavation: truth is geological, not cosmetic. You don’t get to walk the “highway” by presenting a clean mask; you get there by surviving the moment the mask fails. In a culture addicted to reputation management, Allen’s warning lands as both ethical and uncomfortably modern.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Allen, James. (2026, January 17). The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-man-who-cannot-endure-to-have-his-errors-and-28361/
Chicago Style
Allen, James. "The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-man-who-cannot-endure-to-have-his-errors-and-28361/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-man-who-cannot-endure-to-have-his-errors-and-28361/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
