“… the best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.”

— Ronald Fisher

Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956, p. 31.
1950s

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Ronald Fisher 28

English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, a… 1890–1962

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 41 (p. 419)

“When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.”

Norman Vincent Peale book The Power of Positive Thinking

Source: The Power of Positive Thinking

“It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which takes place automatically in the organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1870s, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History (1874)

“Being the best was as equal to being in the middle, which was equal to being the worst. All were merely a state of being. It was how a person felt in that state and why they were in that state that was the important thing.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

De la supériorité des mœurs sur les lois (1831) Oeuvres complètes, vol. VIII, p. 286 https://books.google.de/books?id=yrMFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA286&dq=meilleures.
Original text:
Les meilleures lois ne peuvent faire marcher une constitution en dépit des mœurs ; les mœurs tirent parti des pires lois. C'est là une vérité commune, mais à laquelle mes études me ramènent sans cesse. Elle est placée dans mon esprit comme un point central. Je l'aperçois au bout de toutes mes idées.
1830s
Context: The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

“It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Physics Today (November 2005) page 35

“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

“Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men;”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XVI : The Warning of Experience; Mrs. Maxwell to Helen
Context: Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.

“The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History.
If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 504; also in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)

“… the best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.”

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Ronald Fisher 28

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