“The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.”

— H.L. Mencken

"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s
Context: 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...

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H.L. Mencken 281

American journalist and writer 1880–1956

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“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 (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s

“And took for truth the test of ridicule.”

George Crabbe (1754–1832) English poet, surgeon, and clergyman

Book viii, "The Sisters".
Tales of the Hall (1819)

“It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

6 February 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

As quoted in * 2020-05-16
Trump seems to think there’d be no coronavirus if there was no testing. It doesn’t work like that.
Aaron Rupar
Source: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/15/21259888/trump-coronavirus-testing-very-few-cases

“Ridicule may be the evidence of wit or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 497.

“The difference 'twixt good and bad is not so very much,
A few more minutes at the task, an extra turn or touch,
A final test that all is right—and yet the men are few
Who seem to think it worth their while these extra things to do.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.50 - Clinching the Bolt, stanza 3.

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

“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 book Characteristics

Voltaire, Foreign Review, (1829); compare: "How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?", Shaftesbury, Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.; "Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself", Shaftesbury, Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.; "'T was the saying of an ancient sage [Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18], that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit", ibid. sect. 5.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“Ethical axioms are founded and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics" (1950)
1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)

“Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

La verdad tiene muy pocos amigos y los muy pocos amigos que tiene son suicidas.
Voces (1943)

“The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.”

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