The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Weight Of Authority
Context: We have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. However many nations and generations of men are brought into the witness-box they cannot testify to anything which they do not know. Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all. And when we get back at last to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it: was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?
“The enemy soldier in the Cuban example, which we are now considering, is the junior partner of the dictator; he is the man who gets the last crumbs left to him in a long line of profiteers that begins in Wall Street and ends with him. He is disposed to defend his privileges, but he is disposed to defend them only to the degree that they are important to him. His salary and pension are worth some suffering and some dangers, but they are never worth his life; if the price of maintaining them will cost it, he is better off giving them up, that is to say, withdrawing from the face of guerrilla danger.”
Notes on the Cuban Revolution (1960)
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Ernesto Che Guevara 258
Argentine Marxist revolutionary 1928–1967Related quotes
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Inceldom
“He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.”
Arabian Society In The Middle Ages, by Edward William Lane, (1883) citing Nowwájee, En-, Shems-ed-deen Moḥammad (died 1454), Ḥalbet El-Kumeyt, at footnote 167.
Latter day attributions
“It is good that a man's enemies want him dead, for it proves he has lived a life of worth.”
Source: The Outlaw Josey Wales
(JP IV A81) 1843
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
La condition humaine [Man's Fate] (1933)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLQ3fw-7_hA&feature=bf_next&list=UUNOaQAKNIBe0AHquR9ttP0g&lf=plcp
Dialogue
September “MINE ENEMIES ARE DELIVERED INTO MY HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)