I would rather be politically dead than hypocritically immortalized.
Through books you can start today where the great thinkers of yesterday left off, because books have immortalized man's knowledge. Thinkers, dead a thousand years, are as alive in their books today as when they walked the earth.
If what that man did in his life, makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory, of those who honor him and make whatever the man did live forever.
We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.
Never insult a writer. You may find yourself immortalized in ways you may not appreciate.
