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.
The notion ‘grammatical’ cannot be identified with ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but...only the former is grammatical. (1) Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. (2) Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
Noam ChomskyAmerican linguist and activistborn 1928
Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.
Richard DawkinsEnglish ethologist, evolutionary biologist and authorborn 1941
Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.
His doubts are better than most people’s certainties.
Philip YorkeEnglish lawyer and politician who served as Lord Chancellor1690 - 1764
On ‘Dirleton’s Doubts’, in James Boswell ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ : Knowles, E. (1999). The Oxford dictionary of quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
On ‘Dirleton’s Doubts’, in James Boswell ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ : Knowles, E. (1999). The Oxford dictionary of quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.