[2]
Nature herself will have
proved not a mother, but a stepmother with regard
to what we deem her greatest gift to man, the gift
that distinguishes us from other living things, if she
devised the power of speech to be the accomplice of
crime, the foe to innocency and the enemy of truth.
For it had been better for men to be born dumb and
devoid of reason than to turn the gifts of providence
to their mutual destruction.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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