It might be fabricated, but a story I heard years ago was that Bill Cosby warned a young Oprah Winfrey, to “always balance your own check book.” In other words, he cautioned her to trust only herself, and not any paid employee, with that simple task.

Another piece of advice for the up-and-coming, who are now, after years of struggle, experiencing some success, “Do not believe your own press reports.” In other words, no matter how wonderful and great the journalists and reporters say you are, keep in reserve some small measure of humility.

That virtue of humility is defined as that “state of mind where we see everyone else just as valuable as every other human being on the planet, including ourselves.”

Humility begins with recognizing truth; meaning, not believing all we are told, but reining in our judgments before we leap to premature or faulty conclusions.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates revealed no clear definition of truth. He only believed in questioning all ideas that others claimed were true. He frustrated people with his constant questions: Is that true? Why do you think that? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Where is your evidence?

After all, assertion is not evidence. Where are the corroborating documents, photos, and testimonies that substantiate what he or she is saying is true?

Yes, there are various interpretations of truth. Eye-witnesses stand in various positions and see events unfolding that others cannot see. There are shades of distinction that can blur people’s vision. What we see and hear may not be correct. What others report to us may not be accurate.

Who do you believe? Who do you trust?

When government officials, in any country, spread lies or fabricate stories, that is “propaganda.” Here are three examples of propaganda.

“The lying backfired on Putin when his advisors ‘believed their own propaganda,’ and assured the Russian leader that the war would be over in three days, and the locals would greet the Russians with flowers, like liberators.”

“Putin’s advisors ‘are now afraid to tell him the truth’ about Russia’s rapidly faltering campaign in Ukraine.” “Putin is now turning on his own spy chiefs and military advisors, as the invasion fails.”

Putin may have believed his advisors, who may have failed to tell him the whole truth.

The Washington Post columnist George Will said recently, “The rhetoric of imagined but rarely attained precision is common in modern governance.” Indeed, it is doubly difficult to achieve a successful outcome when lies are laid one on top of another, when graft and corruption run wild.

Putin convinced the Russian people that the Russian army would save Ukrainians from Nazi’s. “He sent Russian conscripts to ‘fight Nazi’s.’ They are there to ‘denazify’ Ukraine and save its Russian-speaking people from ‘genocide.’”

This was less than the truth.

Yet, his words touched a raw nerve, that of the Russian people’s ugly memories of the twentieth-century, when Germany’s Nazi army invaded eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and ended the lives of millions of Russians and Ukrainians. It is now Putin’s excuse, used to justify his invasion.

One statistic sticks out. One out of every four of the six million Jews, who were murdered during the Holocaust, across Europe, lived in Ukraine. No gas chambers there, just bullets and mass graves.

The thing is, the forty-four-year old Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s sixth president, grew up speaking Russian, and is of Jewish heritage.

It was the Nazi’s who murdered his great-grandfather by setting on fire an entire village. Zelenskyy displays very little, if any, love for Nazi’s, but lots of suspicion for the Russian government now.

Who do you and I trust to tell us the truth about this war? The Russians? The Ukrainians? The western media? U.S. government officials? Eye witnesses? Photographs that we have seen? Have you or I arrived at a less-than-accurate conclusion? Whose reporting do we choose to believe as true?

One remembers that in Putin’s former life, he was a spy, a counteragent working for the Soviet Union in Germany, an individual trained to tell lies, to make promises that are never kept, to move people around as if chess pieces, to manipulate, to push here and pull there, to feint left and move right.

Practitioners of espionage soon learn to toss aside the last shreds of humility, to trust no one, to balance their own checkbook, to prepare and eat their own food, to head-fake everybody.

One has to wonder though, how does Putin intend to end this ruinous invasion of Ukraine? I say, he could start with speaking the truth. Amazing things happen when a person tells the truth.

A quote I read years ago said, “The family surname of the betrothed says much about the success of the marriage.” That idea may come near to a singular truth in a general way, despite plenty of examples to contradict it. Yet, I dare suggest something similar, but in a political sense.

How a man or woman identifies his or her citizenship–to what city he or she claims allegiance–tells much about his or her innermost thoughts, ideas, conclusions, and reasoning skills. In other words, tell me the name of your city, and I can predict the ideas that you think and believe.

Yet, not always. Again, outliers who think for themselves.

There were two cities in ancient Greece: Athens and Sparta. The Athenians practiced trade, they valued art and culture, and they ruled themselves by democracy of voters, legislators, and written laws. The Spartans though encouraged a militant society, based on farming and conquering.

Edith Hamilton, a twentieth-century writer, pointed out the distinction between the ancient Greeks, the Athenians, and the rest of the ancient world’s cities, in the first chapter of her book The Greek Way.

“The ancient world bears everywhere the same stamp. In Egypt, Crete, in Mesopotamia, we find the same conditions: a despot enthroned, whose whims and passions are the determining factor in the sate; a wretched, subjugated populace; a great priestly organization, to which is handed over the domain of the intellect. This is what we know as Oriental state today.”

Hamilton then lays down a series of striking, original sentences. “The ancient Greeks were the first Westerners,” “With them, something completely new came into the world.” “The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is Greek discovery.”

“The same cannot be said of Rome, Athens and Rome had little in common.” “The Greeks were the first intellectualists.” “The world we live in seems to us a reasonable and comprehensible place. It is a world of definite facts.” “The East found a way to endure the intolerable.”

“The Greeks were the first people in the world to play”

Hamilton titles her book’s first chapter, “East and West.” Oriental vs. Occidental. The world cleaved into two parts, between tyranny and free-thinking, between autocratic and democratic. Western people think differently, are not anxious to fall into line and, like lemmings, follow a tyrant into the sea.

Charles Dickens compared and contrasted two cities on the first pages of his novel, A Tale of Two Cities: London and Paris. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…

“There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.”

In April of 1775, Boston’s citizens dared to confront with muskets London’s red-coated soldiers at two villages: Lexington and Concord. Then, in July of 1776, in Philadelphia, representatives form the thirteen English colonies declared their independence from London’s Parliament and King George III.

In the 1860s, the United States divided into two parts, each headed by two men in two cities. It was Abraham Lincoln in Washington D.C., and Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia. The former favored union and rejoining; the latter was for division, secession, and absolute separation.

Lincoln wanted to prohibit slavery from expanding into the western territories, but Davis and his fellow Southern planters wanted to extend slavery west, as far as the Pacific Ocean. A great civil war was fought to determine which set of ideas would prevail in the United States of America.

In the 1930s, Germany voted a tyrant into office, who ignited the world into a second world war. Two cities and two men fought it out: the unnamed tyrant in Berlin, and Winston Churchill in London.

Presidents seated in Washington D.C. have taken a number of cities over the decades: Tokyo, Pyongyang, Moscow during the Cold War, Hanoi, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, and now Moscow again. Without fail, it is West vs. East. Now, it is Biden in Washington D.C. and Putin in Moscow.

Or rather, it is Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, in Ukraine, and Putin in Moscow.

Zelenskyy and his fellow Ukrainians are fighting for their land, their government, their people. He and they are caught in the crosshairs of that ideological battle between East and West. Who will win?

When given a choice, common and ordinary people will, for the most part, choose West thinking, the way the ancient Greeks thought and played, but certain leaders are often driven to consolidate their positions of power and beat down all threats to their authority and rule, the East way of thinking.

Hamilton wrote, “The East found a way to endure the intolerable.” She also wrote, “The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery,” and like a magnet that spirit attracts free-thinking people all over the world, both from East and West.

The Irish have their own way of seeing the world. The American poet Marianne Moore said as much in six words. “I’m troubled. I’m dissatisfied. I’m Irish.”

Frank McCourt said the same, but in more words, on the first page of his memoir, Angela’s Ashes.

“It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”

Perhaps the Irish did have it worse than other people, and it soured their slant on the world. Yet, certain of them learned how to turn their desperate misery into words full of fun, wit, and charm.

George Bernard Shaw said: “He knows nothing; and yet he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”

Oscar Wilde said: “True friends stab you in the front.” “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.” “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

Brendan Behan tried to describe a hapless, out-of-luck Irishman. “If it was raining soup, he would go outside with a fork.”

W. B. Yeats said, “Being Irish, I have an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustains me through temporary periods of joy.” For Yeats, tragedy is a given, a constant, but the joy is fleeting.

In a nod to the English bard William Shakespeare, the Irish writer Sean O’Casey said, “All the world’s a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” He also said, “The Irish people treat a joke as a serious thing, and a serious thing as a joke.”

An anonymous Irish writer once observed, “Long ago, when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it’s called golf.”

In addition to witty sayings, the Irish collect their own proverbs, first in Gaelic and then in English.

“It is not the big mansion that makes the happy home.” “Home sweet home, and the fire is out.” “Sweep the corners, and the middle will sweep itself.”

“The worse luck now, the better again,” an observance that luck and misfortune run in cycles.

For medicine, the Irish suggest, “Diet cures more than the doctor.” “Sleep is better than medicine.”

And for two people fond of each other, “There’s no cure for love but marriage.”

Frank McCourt grew up in Limerick, Ireland, on Ireland’s west coast, where the rain never gives up, and yet a limerick is also an Irish poem, composed of five lines. The first two rhyme with each other, the second two rhyme with each other, and the fifth line rhymes with the first two lines.

Bill Kurtis, the announcer on NPR’s show, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, reads all but the last word of the fifth line of a limerick, and then asks a contestant to guess it. For example, last Saturday, he read:

“My sheets are as crisp as they get. / And there’s no signs of mold as of yet. / Before laundry’s complete, / I just take out the sheet, / And I make up my bed while they’re _____.”

The contestant Lauren Pott, from Long Beach, California, guessed “wet,” the correct answer.

America is richer because of the massive numbers of Irish who fled their green island in the mid-nineteenth century because of the blight that killed off their potato crop four years in a row, and caused a famine that killed an estimated one million people. Fortunate were the ones who left before starving.

Frank McCourt finishes his memoir with his first night in America, just after World War II ended, when still in his late teens, after he bought a ticket on a steamer, to leave Ireland, and migrate to New York City. He is still on the boat, anxious to begin a new life in America. He writes,

“I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of America twinkling. He says, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn’t this a great country altogether?”

A memoir of a desperate and miserable childhood, witty remarks, proverbs, limericks. The Irish do have a wonderful way with English words.