על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ד י׳On the Special Laws, Book IV 10
א׳
1[59] The first instruction that the law gives to the judge is that he should not accept idle hearing. What is this? “Let your ears, my friend,” he says, “be purged” and purged they will be if streams of worthy thoughts and words are constantly poured into them and if they refuse to admit the long-winded expositions, the idle hackneyed absurdities of the makers of myths and farces and of vain inventions with their glorification of the worthless.
ב׳
2[60] And the phrase “not accept idle hearing” has another signification consistent with that just mentioned. If men listen to hearsay given as evidence their listening will be idle and unsound. Why so? Because the eyes are conversant with the actual events; they are in a sense in contact with the facts and grasp them in their completeness through the co-operation of the light which reveals and tests everything. But ears, as one of the ancients has aptly said, are less trustworthy than eyes; they are not conversant with facts, but are distracted by words which interpret the facts but are not necessarily always veracious.
ג׳
3[61] And therefore it seems that some Grecian legislators did well when they copied from the most sacred tables of Moses the enactment that hearing is not accepted as evidence, meaning that what a man has seen is to be judged trustworthy, but what he has heard is not entirely reliable.