A Quote by Lord Chesterfield

Ridicule is the best test of truth.

Lord Chesterfield

Quote Topics

Best Ridicule Test Truth

Quote Author

Lord Chesterfield
British - Celebrity
September 22, 1694 - March 24, 1773

It is commonly said that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.

Lord Chesterfield

Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.

William Warburton

And took for truth the test of ridicule.

George Crabbe

It is said that ridicule is the test of truth: it is never applied, but when we wish to deceive ourselves.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

H. L. Mencken

Ridicule may be the evidence of with or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth.

Tryon Edwards

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."

John Keats

It is said that ridicule is the test of truth; but it is never applied except when we wish to deceive ourselves - when if we cannot exclude the light, we would fain draw the curtain before it. The sneer springs out of the wish to deny; and wretched must that state of mind be, that wishes to take refuge in doubt.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The best way to test whether you are saying the truth or not - if you say something and people don't react then it's not the real truth. But if people start reacting then what you are saying has got an element of truth.

Vivek Agnihotri

We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the "post-truth" moment that the proper response might best be ridicule.

Noam Chomsky

[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.

William James

I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.

Ricky Gervais

It is one thing to teach a dynamic Oriental philosophy and religious code; it is quite another to put such a discipline to the test by successfully living it in the face of ridicule.

Frederick Lenz

How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule? - Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury

When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.