Posted on 01/28/2006 7:27:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
the professors and students at Claremont are quite a distance away from being leftists, let alone Marxists...
Kind of like the famous speach of Chief Seattle, which he never made but was the product of a 1970's writer.
The mis-attribution of this statement to Tocqueville has been well known, long before these campus einsteins rediscovered the truth. It's still a nifty epigram, even if he didn't say it.
OK then... if it makes you happy... feel free to obsess on it.
I love it when a voice rings down from the balcony just as the lights begin to dim on stage; too often its echo is drowned by the milling footfalls of the exiting audience, eager to be first to take its leave, lest it be late for the next act.
bttt
Interesting piece. Thanks for posting.
It would be interesting to see an update on this. I wonder how many more times during the past 11 years since this article was published politicians and speechwriters have used and attributed that same "quote" to de Tocqueville?
Thanks for the article.
I always thought the quote was so uplifting that it couldn't have
been written by someone from France.
Lying has its uses and is often necessary in politics...but that's another matter.
LOL... well, if this were the worst thing I could pin on an enemy, I'd be the one with the problem.
Not all that's false is a lie, and not all that's true is honest. You should know that.
I do. I don't necessarily mind lying. I often support it. But it's one thing to lie to others and another to lie to yourself. I was just keeping things straight.
What do you think of this "de Tocqueville quote", which is also all over the Internet, also unsourced?:
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
Questioning the word of ONE first-year student and his prof, without knowing the kind of research they did isn't maligning an entire institution. It's merely questioning the methodology.
That goes for ANY college.
Professors of ANY college are not above sniffing out the makings of a good book and/or article. It still IS "publish or perish" in many instituions, even if it's merely pressure from peers to TO SOMETHING with all that professorial free time. I teach at the college level, so I actually do have some experience with the Ph.D mind.]
Look here
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/815
18th and 19th century quotations often aren't pithy or punchy enough for 20th century audiences.
An example: "[I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity." -- Daniel Webster.
Webster loses a modern audience half way through, and his quote won't stick in the memory.
More quotes on liberty and virtue here.
— Saint-Simon, recently discovered pneumatique.
It's never "Gaulle" but it's (nearly always) "Tocqueville."
What de heck is going on?
Does Paris still have pneumatiques?
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