bunnyjadwiga

From Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience":

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong, which I condemn.

There's a nasty little quote going around the internet, attributed to Ferdinand Magellan. Now, I have no problem with people complaining about christianity or the church for things they actually did. But the problem with this quote is that it alleges that Magellan said the Church told him the earth was flat. I have never been able to find any source of this quote, because the Church did NOT believe the Earth was flat in his time. *

I finally tracked down a source for this quote, because someone else found it:
http://www.churchoffreethought.org/cgi-bin/contray/contray.cgi?DATA=&ID=000011010&GROUP=048

It's not in the words of Magellan. It's in the words of Robert Green Ingersoll, a freethinker, who first used this alleged quote from Magellan, in an 1873 text called Individuality:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html

What's even more curious about this is the text that follows his made-up quote:

The trouble with most people is, they bow to what is called authority; they have a certain reverence for the old because it is old. They think a man is better for being dead, especially if he has been dead a long time. They think the fathers of their nation were the greatest and best of all mankind. All these things they implicitly believe because it is popular and patriotic, and because they were told so when they were very small, and remember distinctly of hearing mother read it out of a book. It is hard to over-estimate the influence of early training in the direction of superstition.

Yup. He's absolutely right. He's managed to put words in the mouth of a guy that was dead over 300 years when he wrote, and because they are both dead, everyone believes that it actually happened.

* while somewhat apologistic, Jeffrey Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians lays out the evidence on this point very well.