Ironically, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous quotation on quotations is usually misquoted or quoted out of context. The original is “Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” (Journals (1822–1855), May 1849 — see for instance wikiquote.) It’s mostly quoted as “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
20 September 2007
22 June 2007
russell’s teapot
Russell’s teapot, from Bertrand Russell, “Is There a God?” (1952), in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament (ed. John C. Slater and Peter Kollner) (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
