A Quote by Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them.
Related Quotes
But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.
Of the women in my childhood, I retain above all the memory of their perfumes, perfumes that lingered - filling the lift with fragrance long after they had gone.
Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
No nation deserves freedom or can long retain it which does not win it for itself. Revolutions must be made by the people and for the people.
Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.
It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
I can at once refute the statement that the people of the West object to conservation of oil resources. They know that there is a limit to oil supplies and that the time will come when they and the Nation will need this oil much more than it is needed now. There are no half measures in conservation of oil.
We're still benefiting from the sacrifices of people long dead, but we're also suffering from their errors.
It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute the latter I collected many proofs, but I do not publish them ... I would dare to publish my speculations if there were people men like you.
Even the most time-honoured truths do not have to be accepted until they are your truths.
Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,--which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced.
People often find it easier to refute a fake extreme opponent than a more cautious real one, so they knock down the straw man instead. It is actually worth the trouble to identify the invalid forms of argument, and to learn their names. Not only can you then avoid them yourself; you can also identify them in opponents. If you call your opponent's errors by their Latin names, you can make it look as though he or she is suffering from a rare tropical disease.
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