King Richard III, act 4. Sc. 4

 
Actual Quote:
“An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.”

In Current Language:
An audience responds more positively to a story that is told simply

Suggestions For Use: It could be your comment on questionable, dubious and intricate statements. Any listener intent to find applications of the quote would have no problem in filling any 24-hour interval, chosen at random, with an abundance of examples, extracted from politicians and/or from people at large who believe themselves to be very important

What Happens in the Actual Play:
King Richard III wants to marry young Elizabeth, daughter of Queen Elizabeth. In turn Queen Elizabeth is the widow of Edward IV, whose killing Richard III himself has just organized.
Richard, with a cheek worthy of a modern politician, prompts the future bride’s  mother to present his marriage suit to her daughter.  Q. Elizabeth replies accordingly.
In more recent times, Obama (and maybe others, who knows), have used essentially the equivalent of the same tactics but with drones and in more gruesome applications.
They called and still call them ‘targeted assassinations,’ as if the victim being a target, would make the assassin a kind of a 9 to 5 office employee, and simultaneously exempt the hands-free principal of any responsibility in the crime.
Which, altogether, constitutes an all-round assassination of the victim, of common sense and of language.
In the play, the unusual – to say the least – Richard’s request for marriage sponsorship from the very mother of the bride, prompts the mother to responds with this line that has no limit of applicability in time or space, “An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.”
Which, in my view, should be imprinted on a mandatory oversized sign to be placed on the office-wall of any politician, right in front of his desk.

Jimmie’s Comment
Of the conversion of the intuitively simple into the unnecessarily complicated there are  countless examples, some funny, some dangerous.
Philosopher, psychologist and historian Max Weber, gives a pointed definition of the obfuscation and confusion of ideas caused by expressing something simple, almost intuitive, with complicated terms and abstruse phrasing – mimicking the language of a certain falsified type of ‘science’.
He says and I quote, “The use of psychological terminology would simply tempt us to elevate, in an amateurish way, what is directly comprehensible and even trivial to the level of scholarly erudition, and thus to create the false impression of an enhanced conceptual precision.”
Weber specifically refers to psychological and psychiatric terminology.  But we may agree that ‘elevating what is directly comprehensible to the level of scholarly erudition to create the false impression of an enhanced conceptual precision’ is a widespread phenomenon.
The ‘success’ of this type of language is enhanced by the status that the regime media inherently attributes and confers to the idea of science, even when some so-called ‘scientists’ are of dubious scientific and even more dubious ethical reputation. Let us remember, for example, the stubbornness with which, notably during the Covid phenomenon, various so-called ‘scientists’ held to their views, rejecting those of other scientists who disagreed both with the diagnosis, the cures and the vaccines for ‘Covid’. In these cases the words of writer Upton Sinclair offer, perhaps, the most logical explanation and are worthy of a repetition, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” A frightful truth, considering that this false understanding of Covid has led to the death of thousands if not millions.

Anyway, the conclusions we can draw from today’s quote almost naturally lead to another equally pointed Shakespearean quote. For those who cannot tell an honest tale are equally and often “false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hogs in sloth, foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness, dogs in madness and lions in prey.” That quote, by the way, is from King Lear.