[Thomas Chaloner] had a trick sometimes to goe into Westminster hall in a morning in Terme time, and tell some strange story (sham), and would come thither again about 11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred; and sometimes it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce knowe it to be his owne.
— John Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1697
My success as a salesman depends on trust: Before I can close a sale with you, you have to trust me. But this requires me to act deliberately in a way that appears sincere. It’s not enough simply to be sincere and hope that you notice this; my best interests are served by actively cultivating this impression. And this kills true sincerity — now I’m self-consciously promoting an appearance.
“If sincerity is a natural and unforced conformity between avowals and actions, then it does not make sense to try to be sincere or to devise strategies for becoming more sincere, both of which require the deliberate attempt to achieve a state that cannot be brought about by calculation,” writes Monmouth College philosopher Guy Oakes. “Their self-consciousness — their knowledge of the circumstances of their role and the conditions required for its performance — rules out the possibility of sincerity. Sincerity produces insincerity.”
(Guy Oakes, “The Sales Process and the Paradoxes of Trust,” Journal of Business Ethics 9:8 [August 1990], 671-679.)
Lady Kent articled with Sir Edward Herbert that he should come to her when she sent for him; and stay with her as long as she would have him, to which he set his hand; then he articled with her that he should go away when he pleased, and stay away as long as he pleased, to which she set her hand. This is the epitome of all the contracts in the world.
— John Selden, Table Talk, 1689
I am told that a certain friend of mine, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, was of an extreme nimbleness, an agility which he could not well control. One day that grave and reverend personage, the Master of his college, happening to meet him, remonstrated with him thus: ‘Mr. Dash, I am sorry to say I never look out of my window but I see you jumping over those railings.’ Mr. Dash was equal to the emergency, for he respectfully replied, ‘And it is a curious fact, sir, that I never leap over those railings without seeing you looking out of that window.’
— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879
During the Battle of Waterloo, a cannon shot struck the right leg of Henry Paget, Second Earl of Uxbridge, prompting this quintessentially British exchange:
Uxbridge: By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!
Wellington: By God, sir, so you have!
That may be apocryphal, but the leg went on to a colorful career of its own.
The single most British conversation in the history of human civilization, in my judgment, took place on the Upper Nile in 1899, when starving explorer Ewart Grogan stumbled out of the bush and surprised one Captain Dunn, medical officer of a British exploratory expedition:
Dunn: How do you do?
Grogan: Oh, very fit thanks; how are you? Had any sport?
Dunn: Oh pretty fair, but there is nothing much here. Have a drink? You must be hungry; I’ll hurry on lunch.
“It was not until the two men had almost finished the meal that Dunn thought it excusable to enquire about the identity and provenance of his guest.”
The problem of indoctrination is this: in a modern democratic society, the desired goal of education is that each student develop a set of beliefs that are rationally grounded and open to change when challenged by better-grounded beliefs. In order to develop such students, however, it would seem that they must acquire a belief in rational methods of knowing which must itself be beyond challenge, i.e., held in a manner inconsistent with its own content. Thus, students must be indoctrinated in order not to be indoctrinated: a pedagogical dilemma or paradox.
— Charles James Barr Macmillan, “‘On Certainty’ and Indoctrination,” Synthese 56:3 (September 1983), 363-372
T.H. Huxley believed in the precept that magna est veritas et prævalebit — truth is great and will prevail.
“Truth is great, certainly,” he wrote, “but, considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.”
(From Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 1863.)
Terms for times of day in the reckoning of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, from missionary James Sibree’s 1915 book A Naturalist in Madagascar:
midnight: centre of night; halving of night
2:00 a.m.: frog croaking
3:00 a.m.: cock-crowing
4:00 a.m.: morning also night
5:00 a.m.: crow croaking
5:15 a.m.: bright horizon; reddish east; glimmer of day
5:30 a.m.: colors of cattle can be seen; dusk; diligent people awake; early morning
6:00 a.m.: sunrise; daybreak; broad daylight
6:15 a.m.: dew-falls; cattle go out (to pasture)
6:30 a.m.: leaves are dry (from dew)
6:45 a.m.: hoar-frost disappears; the day chills the mouth
8:00 a.m.: advance of the day
9:00 a.m.: over the purlin
noon: over the ridge of the roof
12:30 p.m.: day taking hold of the threshold
1:00 p.m.: peeping-in of the day; day less one step
1:30–2:00 p.m.: slipping of the day
2:00 p.m.: decline of the day; at the rice-pounding place; at the house post
3:00 p.m.: at the place of tying the calf
4:00 p.m.: at the sheep or poultry pen
4:30 p.m.: the cow newly calved comes home
5:00 p.m.: sun touching (i.e. the eastern wall)
5:30 p.m.: cattle come home
5:45 p.m.: sunset flush
6:00 p.m.: sunset (literally, “sun dead”)
6:15 p.m.: fowls come in
6:30 p.m.: dusk; twilight
6:45 p.m.: edge of rice-cooking pan obscure
7:00 p.m.: people begin to cook rice
8:00 p.m.: people eat rice
8:30 p.m.: finished eating
9:00 p.m.: people go to sleep
9:30 p.m.: everyone in bed
10:00 p.m.: gun-fire
Native houses were built with their length running north-south and a single door and window facing west, so they served as rude sundials: By 9 a.m. the sun was nearly square with the eastern purlin of the roof, and at noon it stood over the ridge pole. As the afternoon advanced it peered in at the door and its light crept eastward across the floor, touching successively the rice-mortar, the central posts where the calf was fastened for the night, and finally the eastern wall.
Think of democracy as a machine. At fixed intervals, the preferences of individual citizens are fed into the machine, and it aggregates them and produces a “choice” of its own. Democratic rule is achieved if, when the machine isn’t working, its most recent choice is acted upon.
“The question now arises: What is the authority of the choice expressed by the machine?” writes philosopher Richard Wollheim. “More specifically, why should someone who has fed his choice into the machine and then is confronted by the machine with a choice non-identical with his own, feel any obligation to accept it?”
(Richard Wollheim, “A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy,” in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series: A Collection, 1962.)
