Melville on the Avenues of Perception

Winslow Homer, High Cliff on the Maine Coast (1894)

I agree with you in thinking that the lawyer, and the congressman, and the editor, are in error, but only in so far as each claims peculiar facilities for the sort of knowledge in question; because, you see, sir, the truth is, that every trade or pursuit which brings one into contact with the facts, sir, such trade or pursuit is equally an avenue to those facts.

–Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ch. 43 (1857)