“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.”
Source: What Is Man? (1906), Ch. 6
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Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Deming Headlight (New Mexico), 6 January 1950, as cited in the Yale Book of Modern Proverbs and at There Are Opinions, And Then There Are Facts; Freakonomics blog post by Fred R. Shapiro http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/18/there-are-opinions-and-then-there-are-facts/ (18 August 2011)
Voices from the Sky : Previews of the Coming Space Age (1967)
1960s
D 58
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
"In Front of Your Nose" http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose, Tribune (22 March 1946)
Context: The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. V, sec. 27
Two Treatises of Government (1689)