Even if you and I are lied about, ridiculed, double-crossed, knifed in the back, and sold
down the river by one out of every six of our most intimate friends-let's not indulge in an
orgy of self-pity. Instead, let's remind ourselves that that's precisely what happened to
Jesus. One of His twelve most intimate friends turned traitor for a bribe that would
amount, in our modern money, to about nineteen dollars. Another one of His twelve
most intimate friends openly deserted Jesus the moment He got into trouble, and
declared three times that he didn't even know Jesus-and he swore as he said it. One out
of six! That is what happened to Jesus. Why should you and I expect a better score?
I discovered years ago that although I couldn't keep people from criticising me unjustly, I
could do something infinitely more important: I could determine whether I would let the
unjust condemnation disturb me.
Let's be clear about this: I am not advocating ignoring all criticism. Far from it. I am
talking about ignoring only unjust criticism. I once asked Eleanor Roosevelt how she
handled unjust criticism-and Allah knows she's had a lot of it. She probably has more
ardent friends and more violent enemies than any other woman who ever lived in the
White House.
She told me that as a young girl she was almost morbidly shy, afraid of what people
might say. She was so afraid of criticism that one day she asked her aunt, Theodore
Roosevelt's sister for advice. She said: "Auntie Bye, I want to do so-and-so. But I'm
afraid of being criticised."
Teddy Roosevelt's sister looked her in the eye and said: "Never be bothered by what
people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right." Eleanor Roosevelt told me
that that bit of advice proved to be her Rock of Gibraltar years later, when she was in
the White House. She told me that the only way we can avoid all criticism is to be like a
Dresden-china figure and stay on a shelf. "Do what you feel in your heart to be right-for
you'll be criticised, anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't." That
is her advice.
When the late Matthew C. Brush, was president of the American International
Corporation at 40 Wall Street, I asked him if he was ever sensitive to criticism; and he
replied: "Yes, I was very sensitive to it in my early days. I was eager then to have all the
employees in the organisation think I was perfect. If they didn't, it worried me. I would try
to please first one person who had been sounding off against me; but the very thing I did
to patch it up with him would make someone else mad. Then when I tried to fix it up with
this person, I would stir up a couple of other bumble-bees. I finally discovered that the
more I tried to pacify and to smooth over injured feelings in order to escape personal
criticism, the more certain I was to increase my enemies. So finally I said to myself: 'If
you get your head above the crowd, you're going to be criticised. So get used to the
idea.' That helped me tremendously. From that time on I made it a rule to do the very
best I could and then put up my old umbrella and let the rain of criticism drain off me
instead of running down my neck."
Deems Taylor went a bit further: he let the rain of criticism run down his neck and had a
good laugh over it-in public. When he was giving his comments during the intermission
of the Sunday afternoon radio concerts of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony
Orchestra, one woman wrote him a letter calling him "a liar, a traitor, a snake and a
moron".
On the following week's broadcast, Mr. Taylor read this letter over the radio to millions of
listeners. In his book, Of Men & Music, he tells us that a few days later he received
another letter from the same lady, "expressing her unaltered opinion that I was still a liar,