Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Reputedly, Genghis Khan once asked his friends what was the greatest pleasure in life. They variously answered typical Mongol things like feasting, hunting, falconry, archery, and so on. Then Genghis said:
The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms
Or to paraphrase it in the bluntest possible modern terms: "To kill people, take their property, see and enjoy the pain you have caused their families, and rape their women as a final gesture of power."
I have to confess to a bit of egg on my face, because I quoted this saying at face value until someone asked for an original source. I went back to my original reference but found no citation. I haven't yet found the original source, and the saying may be apocryphal. It could also be in some chronicle I haven't yet identified. In that case, it could also be, or not be, a real quote.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
This one has been tracked to an original source, a 1906 article by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre. She did not attribute the words to Voltaire, but used them to describe his attitude, obviously intending them to be taken as her own summation, not Voltaire's
Good thing, too, because if Voltaire had said them, we'd have excellent reason to knock him off his pedestal. It is surely one of the most stupid remarks ever made (although in original context it is a lot more defensible than the glib way people usually quote it).
There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey.
Ruskin scholars have never found any evidence that Ruskin said it.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Sometimes this paragraph is followed by:
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Nobody can find anything like this in either Tytler's or de Tocqueville's writings, and the quotes have not been identified in any context before about 1950.
Useful idiots
Nobody's ever been able to find this quote in Lenin's writings.
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Created 18 July 2008; Last Update 18 January, 2020
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