“My grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron, was always making dramatic declarations, and one day when he was in his fifties he appeared in font of his family to announce that he was giving up the morning newspaper. He had been looking into the matter, he said and had discovered that the number of books even a non-newspaper-reading man could get through in a lifetime was so small — five thousand, according to my grandfather’s calculations — that permitting himself such a daily distraction was simply out of the question. My grandfather had been an avid reader of newspapers since the age of six, and he freely admitted that they had their pleasures and their virtues, but now, with some force, he promised that he would no longer submit to them. And he didn’t; he never read the newspaper again.” (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Fly Swatter)

“When King Pyrrhus was undertaking his expedition into Italy, Cyneas, his wise counselor, wanting to make him feel the vanity of his ambition, asked him: ‘Well, Sire, to what purpose are you setting up this great enterprise?’ ‘To make myself master of Italy’, he immediately replied. ‘And then’, continued Cyneas, ‘when that is done?’ ‘I shall pass over into Gaul and Spain’, said the other. ‘And after that?’ ‘I shall go and subdue Africa; and finally, when I have brought the world under my subjection, I shall rest and live content and at my ease’. ‘In Gods name, Sire’, Cyneas then retorted, ‘tell me what keeps you from being in that condition right now, if that is what you want. Why don’t you settle down at this very moment in the state you say you aspire to, and spare yourself all the intervening toil and risks?'” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“But the worst mischief of all is this, that nothing we decree shall stand firm and that we will not know that a city with the worse laws, if immoveable, is better than one with good laws when they be not binding, and that a plain wit accompanied with modesty is more profitable to the state than dexterity with arrogance, and that the more ignorant sort of men do, for the most part, better regulate a commonwealth than they that are wiser. For these love to appear wiser than the laws and in all public debatings to carry the victory as the worthiest things wherein to show their wisdom, from whence most commonly proceeds the ruin of the states they live in. Whereas the other sort, mistrusting their own wits, are content to be esteemed not so wise as the laws and not able to carp at what is well spoken by another, and so, making themselves equal judges rather than contenders for mastery, govern a state for the most part well. We therefore should do the like and not be carried away with combats of eloquence and wit to give such counsel to your multitude as in our own judgments we think not good.” (Thucydides, tr. Thomas Hobbes, 1628)

“Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.” (Thucydides, tr. Richard Crawley, 1874)

“We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, than with good laws that are constantly being altered, that lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. But the other kind — the people who are not so confident in their own intelligence — are prepared to admit that the laws are wiser than they are and that they lack the ability to pull to pieces a speech made by a good speaker; they are unbiased judges, and not people taking part in some kind of a competition; so things usually go well when they are in control. We statesmen, too, should try to be like them, instead of being carried away by mere cleverness and a desire to show off our intelligence and so giving you, the people, advice which we do not really believe in ourselves.” (Thucydides, tr. Rex Warner, 1954)

“In addition to the biases in perception already described, observers in less-developed countries can be affected by a special difficulty in detecting changes in their own societies, regardless of any comparison with what happens or has happened elsewhere, A reason for this difficulty can be found in the image which these observers have of their own societies, in the lenses they use to look at them, or, for short, in their ideologies. It is probably a principal characteristic of less-developed, dependent countries that they import their ideologies, both those that are apologetic and those that are subversive of the status quo. There always exists a considerable distance between variegated and ever-changing reality, on the one hand, and the rigid mold of ideology, on the other. The distance and the misfit, however, are likely to be much more extensive when the ideology is imported than when it is homegrown. In the latter case, an important social change which is not accounted for by the prevailing ideology will soon be noted and the ideology will be criticized and either adapted to the new situation or exchanged for a new one. A good example is the Revisionist criticism of orthodox Marxism which appeared even during the lifetime of Engels as a result of certain developments in German society which were hard to fit into Marxist doctrine. When the ideology is imported, on the other hand, the extent to which it fits the reality of the importing country is usually quite poor from the start. Given this initial disparity, additional changes in the country’s social, economic, or political structure that contradict the ideology do not really worsen the fit substantially and are therefore ignored or else easily rationalized. The free-trade doctrine imported from England into Latin America in the nineteenth century and so poorly adapted to the needs of that continent was fully routed there only as a result of the two World Wars and the Depression. The long life of the oft-refuted explanation of Latin American societies in terms of the dichotomy between oligarchy and mass may be another case in point. On the North American Left, the notion, imported by Marxist thought, that the white working class is the “natural ally” of the oppressed Negro masses also held sway for an extraordinarily long period, considering the over whelming and cumulative evidence to the contrary. Thus, an ideology can draw strength from the very fact that it does so poorly at taking the basic features of socio-economic structure into account. Among ideologies, in other words, it is the least fit that have the greatest chance of survival! And as long as the misfit ideology survives, perception of change — and of reality in general — is held back. To illustrate the point further, I must tell one last story: A man approaches another exclaiming: ‘Hello, Paul. It’s good to see you after so many years, but you have changed so much! You used to be fat, now you are quite thin; you used to be tall, now you are rather short. What happened, Paul?’ ‘Paul’ rather timidly replies: ‘But my name is not Paul’. Whereupon the other retorts, quite pleased with his interpretation of reality: ‘You see how much you have changed! Even your name has changed!'” (Albert Hirschman, 1968, Underdevelopment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership. Daedalus, 97, 925–937.)

«Il n’y a que les fols certains et résolus». Le rôle de la raison, qui «est une touche pleine de fausseté, d’erreur, de faiblesse et de défaillance» (II, XII, A, 541), n’est pas de discerner la vérité, mais de détruire les vérités prétendues afin de les réduire à ce qu’elles sont: de simples opinions. Elle déraisonne lorsqu’elle veut construire. Son rôle, le seul qu’elle puisse, dans son usage théorique, mener à bien, est purement critique, destructeur. Elle s’égare et se fait sophistique lorsqu’elle engage le débat autrement que pour mettre en doute. Les principes d’une philosophie, quelle qu’elle soit, sont essentiellement douteux, puisqu’on peut leur opposer des principes contraires. Comment bâtirait-on du certain sur du douteux? Lorsqu’un philosophe se voit demander raison de ses principes, il ne peut la donner, car il ne peut remonter à l’infini. Or la raison ne se lasse pas de demander le pourquoi, d’interroger, et ainsi va à l’infini. Il suffit donc d’exercer sa raison pour mettre toutes choses en doute. Le doute est l’exercice même de la raison. Le bon usage de la raison et la certitude sont exclusifs l’un de l’autre. (Marcel Conche, 1991, Montaigne et la Philosophie)

“We are surrounded by mysteries: the mystery of the absence of outstanding leaders anywhere on this planet; the mystery of teachers no longer able to teach children to read and write; the mystery of the blurring of differences between men and women — in San Francisco even a close look does not always tell you beyond doubt the sex of a person; the mystery of a majority incapable of getting angry with those who trample it underfoot. No other century has seen so great a waste of young lives as we have seen with our eyes — not only in the two World Wars but in the 1960s. The twentieth century seems a crazed monstrous beast devouring its young.” (Eric Hoffer, 1979, Before the Sabbath)

“It is not only the fevers, the potions, and the great accidents that upset our judgment; the slightest things in the world whirl it around. And there is no doubt, even though we do not feel it, that if a continuous fever can prostrate our soul, tertian fever causes some alteration in it, according to its measure and proportion. If apoplexy completely deadens and extinguishes the sight of our intelligence, there is no doubt that a bad cold dazzles it. And consequently, we can hardly find a single hour in our life when our judgment is in its proper seat, our body being subject to so many continual changes, and filled with so many springs of action that I can well believe the doctors how unlikely it is that there will not always be one of them pulling crooked. Moreover, this malady is not so easily discovered, unless it is wholly extreme and irremediable; inasmuch as reason always goes its way, even though crooked, lame, and broken-hipped, and with falsehood as with truth. Thus it is not easy to discover its miscalculation and irregularity. I always call reason that semblance of intellect that each man fabricates in himself. That reason, of which, by its condition, there can be a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead and of wax, stretchable, pliable, and adaptable to all biases and all measures; all that is needed is the ability to mold it. However good a judge’s intentions are, unless he listens closely to himself, which few people amuse themselves in doing, his inclination to friendship, kinship, beauty, and vengeance, and not only things so weighty, but that fortuitous instinct that makes us favor one thing more than another and that assigns us, without leave of our reason, our choice between two like objects, or some shadow of equal emptiness, can insinuate insensibly into his judgment the favor or disfavor of a cause, and tip the scales.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“Good scholars need intelligence, creativity, persistence (Sitzfleisch), and intellectual honesty. (Luck, too, is useful.) Outside mathematics and physics, a high level of intelligence is not essential, although a modicum is obviously necessary. Creativity seems to depend both on the innate capacity of the unconscious to form associations, which cause the solution to a problem to appear when you wake up in the morning, and on the accumulation of elements between which those associations might be made. That accumulation in turns depends on a wide and broad reading of the classics and of history. The classics can provide explicit mechanisms, often in lapidary form. Historians often provide implicit or potential mechanisms, in addition to showing us the varieties of human behavior and social organization. Psychology and behavioral economics can refine the mechanisms and transform them into testable hypotheses, as well as coming up with ideas that nobody has thought of. Persistence is needed for the necessary attention to detail. It is too much to ask that scholars should have ‘the infinite capacity for taking pains’ that has been used as a definition of genius, but they should use shoe leather. Intellectual honesty may not matter much in mathematics and physics, since formal proofs and replicable experiments do not depend on the possession of that quality. Honesty (and modesty) is vital, however, in disciplines where the constraints created by deductive logic and hard facts are lacking. If someone asked me how to acquire it, I would say: Read Montaigne.” (Jon Elster, 2015, Explaining Social Behavior)

L’agitation et la chasse est proprement de nostre gibier: nous ne sommes pas excusables de la conduire mal et impertinemment; de faillir à la prise, c’est autre chose. Car nous sommes nais à quester la verité; il appartient de la posseder à une plus grande puissance. (Montaigne)

Agitation and the chase are properly our quarry; we are not excusable if we conduct it badly and irrelevantly; to fail in the catch is another thing. For we are born to quest after truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (Donald Frame, 1943)

Agitation, stirring and hunting, is properly belonging to our subject or drift; wee are not excusable to conduct the same ill and impertinently, but to misse the game and faile in taking, that’s another matter. For wee are borne to quest and seeke after trueth; to possesse it belongs to a greater power. (John Florio, 1603)

To hunt after truth is properly our business, and we are inexcusable if we carry on the chase impertinently and ill; to fail of seizing it is another thing, for we are born to inquire after truth: it belongs to a greater power to possess it. (Charles Cotton, 1685)

The real object of our hunting is excitement and the hunt itself; we have no excuse for conducting it badly and irrelevantly. To fail in capturing any thing is another matter, for we are destined from birth to quest the truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (George Burnham Ives, 1925)

The excitement of the chase is properly our quarry. We are not to be pardoned if we carry it on badly or foolishly; to fail to seize the prey is a different matter. For we are born search after the truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (Emil J. Trechmann, 1927)

The activity of the hunt is properly our business; we are not excused if we conduct it badly and unsuitably; to fail in seizing the prey is another thing. For we are born to quest after truth; to possess it belogs to a greater power. (Jacob Zeitlin, 1934)

The active pursuit of truth is our proper business. We have no excuse for conducting it badly or unfittingly. But failure to capture our prey is another matter. For we are born to quest after it; to possess it belongs to a greater power. (John M. Cohen, 1958)

The game which we hunt is the fun of the chase: we are inexcusable if we pursue it badly or foolishly: it is quite another thing if we fail to make a kill. For we are born to go in quest of truth: to take possession of it is the property of a greater Power. (M. A. Screech, 1987)

“A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live healthy so long. ‘Ignorance of medicine’, he replied. And the Emperor Hadrian kept crying out as he was dying that the crowd of doctors had killed him. BA bad wrestler turned doctor. ‘Take heart’, Diogenes said to him, ‘you are right; now you will bring down those who brought you down before’. But they have this luck, according to Nicocles, that the sun shines on their successes, and the earth hides their failures. And besides, they have a very convenient way of making use of all kinds of results; for the good and the health that fortune, nature, or some other extraneous cause (of which the number is infinite) produces in us, it is the privilege of medicine to attribute to itself. All the happy results that happen to the patient who is under its care are due to it. The circumstances that have cured me and that cure a thousand others who do not call the doctors to their aid, they usurp in the case of their patients. And as for the mishaps, either they completely disavow them, by attributing the blame to the patient, for reasons so frivolous that they cannot possibly fail to find always a good enough number of them: he uncovered his arm; he heard the noise of a coach… someone opened his window; he lay down on his left side; or some troublesome thought passed through his head — in short, a word, a dream, a look, seems to them sufficient excuse to put the blame off their own shoulders. Or, if they so please, they actually make use of our getting worse, and do their business by this other means that can never fail them, which is to reward us, when the disease has become hotter by their prescriptions, with the assurance they give us that it would have become even worse without their remedies. The man whom they have cast from a chill into a quotidian fever, without them would have had a continued fever. They need not worry about doing their job badly, since the damage turns to their profit. Truly they are right to require the full confidence of the patient; it must indeed be well-intentioned and very pliable to apply itself to notions so hard to believe.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)