And took for truth the test of ridicule.
--
Book viii, "The Sisters".George Crabbe
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It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.
Philip Stanhope
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? . . . They are laughing at Nietzsche yet . . .
H. L. Mencken
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."
Thomas Carlyle
How comes it to pass then, that we appear such Cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the Test of Ridicule?
Anthony Ashley-Cooper
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
Miguel de Unamuno
Crabbe, George
Crace, Jim
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