Posted on 01/28/2006 7:27:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
ping
Oh. Ya learn the darnest things on FR.
> Say what you want about the famous quote attributed to Tocqueville -- it's like feeding chicken soup to a corpse, it ain't going to hurt anything.
Uh... huh.
"You know all that stuuf people say about me being divine? It's rubbish. When I was young, I bummed around with my posse and performed some magic tricks, including a pretty good escape trick." - Jesus of Nazareth, 64 AD
"We got about 500 miles out, and then decided to turn north and go to Iceland. We partied for a while and then went back and claimed we'd gotten to India. Imagine my surprise... " Christopher Columbus, 1497
"Actually, she didn't drown... I strangled her in a drunken rage and then dumped the car to make it look like an accident." Teddy The Swimmer, 1974
"The American people would have to be complete fu--ing morons if they allow Social Security to continue for another minute." FDR, 1941
"Wow. I still can't believe they baught it." A. Hitler, 1956
Yeah, let's just make stuff up. Ain't going to hurt anything.
Mohammed professed to derive from Heaven, and has inserted in the Koran, not only religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science.
The Gospel, on the contrary, speaks only of the general relations of men to God and to each other, beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith.
This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, while the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
At the time he wrote this, as I recall, the Ottoman Turkish Empire was still quite large ....
Do you think people who have used the quote are liars?
Amazing that it came from a frogFrenchman.
Both France and America could do well to remember his words.
The godless and thereby souless Americans who would delete God from our society are driving us farther and farther away from our roots, our genius and our power.
Sleazywood, newsrags, magazines, T.V., books (Oprah as a book critic HAS to be the depth of low taste on our planet.), pop music and fashion-for-the-young all strive for their Almightly Buch AND desperately try to inculcate our society down the path of least resistance.
It's bad enough to be such a money-grubbing society but to add the agenda of DESPERATELY leading our people down the sleaziest, lowest, coarsest, crudest, most vulgar, least uplifting, least moral path is the very worst. They show us the low road.
Music and its collection of pornography put all the sewage to rhythm so we can dance and drive ourselves to relative moralism (If it feels good, do it. I'm a victim.).
Sleazywood produces a steady flow of anti-American, anti-police, anti-military movies, stupid, vapid comedies, action and sci-fi movies which denegrate non-minority males as weak, stupid anti-heroes to be saved, in the nick of time no less, by strong, balanced, smart women and minority heroes.
T.V. adds its might with its steady flow of comedic, dramatic, historical-lying, left-wing news and analysis septic fuel. Americans cackle, crow, guffaw and applaud at the soft porn, homosexual comedy, self-aborbption, youth-minority-woman worshipping casts and agenda-driven dramas and consider themselves well entertained.
Even the History Channel manages to skew the world. I remember one "Story of Jesus" production that said that Jesus was "probably" only a stonemason, probably got married, had children and was really nothing but a "good man" who really didn't perform any miracles. That was just mob hysteria and wannabe fairytale storytelling. After all, there were tons of "Jesuses" at the time with Messianic fervor a norm.
Fox News ran a "Story of Jesus" that I HAD to turn off, it was so anti-Christ.
I often go to the "religious" section of this site just to read some uplifting, positive stuff, even if it's only the latest debate within the Episcopalian Church or the latest rantings of the Russian and other Orthodoxies. Hope they don't catch me at this. They are rather touchy. :o)
Is there a smaller font than one? Say a "1/8" font? Lol.
I hope you're not one of'em! Yikes.
Do you know how much faith I have in the first-year college student (all of 18-years-old and his professor (left wing communist leanings perhaps, hoping to drive this "find" to a book)?
ZERO.
Let's determine the accuracy of the student and professor and what their agenda might possibly be.
Let's verify these verifiers.
Just because THEY didn't find it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Did they go to France and read French resources? Did they read French resources here? Or was this merely a Google search?
Like I said, I trust THEIR methodology and judgement as much as I trust MSNBC's.
MLC9852 said: I agree.
I don't think this interesting article suggested that any great harm came from the invented quote which, everyone seems to agree, is rather bracing.
I think many of us regard the correcting of such things as a mildly useful amusement. It is not an attack on the quote or the people who have used it.
As others have eloquently said here, there is a value to getting our history correct. I just don't see getting defensive about people -- with no agenda or edge -- making corrections in the historical record. I'm sure you both don't really mean to be standing up for the idea that historical errors should be let stand. It is okay to breeze on by such corrections if they hold no interest for you. No need to take an active stand for ignorance and error.
Do you know how much faith I have in the first-year college student (all of 18-years-old and his professor (left wing communist leanings perhaps, hoping to drive this "find" to a book)?
ZERO.
Let's determine the accuracy of the student and professor and what their agenda might possibly be.
Let's verify these verifiers.
Just because THEY didn't find it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Did they go to France and read French resources? Did they read French resources here? Or was this merely a Google search?
I trust THEIR methodology and judgement as much as I trust MSNBC's.
It's a good line, with a lot of truth in it.
While it would be interesting to find out who did in fact come up with it first... the inability to attribute it doesn't change the essence of the point.
This article doesn't even prove for that matter that Tocqueville didn't say it. This article merely points out that it isn't in Democracy in America, where everybody thought it was. It does sound like something Tocqueville might have said... and it remains possible that he did say it. He just didn't say it in that book.
It's a little over the top to call any of it a "lie". To discover that something you've always thought to be true... is not... is hardly a lie. It's a mistake. I scarcely think that there's been some farreaching conspiracy to go around attributing interesting quotes to obscure French writers. Maybe there was, but I missed the meetings.
"But there are others who look forward to a republican form of government as a tranquil and lasting state, towards which modern society is daily impelled by the ideas and manners of the time, and who sincerely desire to prepare men to be free. When these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity? "
I've read Democracy in America. The quote isn't there. I have a Ph.D.
Unfortunately, news of our errors does not always arrive from our friends.
I would say that the priority (in this dusty and trivial matter) would be to find the truth ~~before~~ loading up for an ad hominem charge in the culture wars.
You are correct, but this isn't a big deal, if Tocqueville said it fine, if not not we simply quit attributing it to him. I do believe we need to be obsessive about accuracy in history
Since we can no longer attribute it to De Toqueville, in future just credit me with it.
If I've said it once, I've said it, well, a dozen times. OK, not in print, but I said it.
So just say, "as the mighty marron often said..."
Yes, since the alternative is that they're ignoramuses.
LOL
Thus they're lying. No way around it.
In Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land he has his character Jubal Harshaw say:
"Once, when I was a kid in high school, I won a debate on shipping subsidies by quoting an overwhelming argument from the files of the British Colonial Shipping Board. The opposition was totally unable to refute me - because there never was a 'British Colonial Shipping Board.' I had made it up, whole cloth.
You can usually only get away with that stuff if you can somehow arrange it so that no one will ever check.
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