死人に口なし
2008年5月27日分『ベリキュー！』で、真野ちゃんが引用していたローウェル（James Russell Lowell：詩人・外交官、1819-1891）の格言。
「愚者と死者のみはけっして己の意見を変えない」
元ネタは、1898年に公表されたエッセイ『POLITICAL ESSAYS』中にある『ABRAHAM LINCOLN』の部分より。
↓からその部分を引用しておく。
・The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V by Lowell（The Project Gutenberg eBook）
（中略）『ABRAHAM LINCOLN』は、時の大統領 Lincoln の 1864-1865 年の事を色々書いてるエッセイだったりする。
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and more permanent concerns.
But it is on the understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly is not true of governments.
It is by a multitude of such considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and therefore wise.
The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.
（以下略）
Lincoln はこの2年間足らずで、大統領再選・南北戦争終結・暗殺・・・とあまりに激しい経験をしたんだよな（暗殺は少し違うが）。
う〜ん、深いな。
え、引用部分が長い？
放っといてくれ
