The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
-George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, 1913
Tag: Quotes
If Fifty Million People Say A Foolish Thing
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
-Anatole France
So this quote is commonly, but falsely, attributed to Bertrand Russell.
Wikiquote attributes this to Anatole France, but I’m suspicious of the cited source. Specifically, they reference the quote as appearing in 1954’s Listening and Speaking: A Guide to Effective Oral Communication by Ralph G. Nichols and Thomas R. Lewis.
Aside from making that a second hand rather than primary source, the Wikiquote page notes that a virtually identical saying appears in W. Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook. That book was published in 1949, but contains entries from a journal that Maugham began keeping in 1892.
According to Wikiquote, the following quote appears in a 1901 entry in A Writer’s Notebook,
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
John Stuart Mill on Freedom of Speech
We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quote
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, November 8, 1838
A Man’s Support for Absolute Government
“Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Ancien Regime and the Revolution, 1858.
George Orwell on Political Language
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946