Quoting dead people

Remove all ads!

Now here's something that I really don't like and truly despise. It does not happen that much here but occationally you see some idiot quoting an old party leader or something similar. Quoting people that are alive is fine, atleast then they have the opportunity to speak out if their words are misused. However people who have been dead a century or so pretty much lack the luxury, meaning that their spoken/written words can and are being abused towards any given political purpose. There are only two places where I find this sort of quoting acceptable, funerals and comemorative(sp?) occations.

 

So the wisdom of those who came before us is forbidden or pointless, in your opinion? Or am I picking up a subtle qualifier - no such behaviour should be allowed in political speeches, et al.?

I find this quite engaging and surprisingly serendipitous as I was just about to go Random Babble a (IMO) profound G.K. Chesterton quote I came across...I am rife with curiosity now.

 

The wisdom is not forbidden or pointless. What is pointless though is taking a individual sentence out of a broader context and throwing it around like it would mean something significant, which it without the context never really does. If you throw to random babbling a quote you think was simply nice then it's not a problem, the problems start when you start inteprenting the meaning of the quote. This is not just limited to political speeches but political speeches/discussion are the place where quotes are abused the most.

 

First I like to stress that the correctness of a quote doesn't depend on the author being alive or not. Problems are only (a) the actual and historical context, and (b) the inability of the author to protest being (mis-)quoted.

But we all know the sort of 'argument' where one sais:

* Fried eggs?
* Hitler said: "I like fried eggs!"
* How can you possibly like fried eggs?

or the other way around:

* I say we got to do A
* As Winston Chruchill already said: "A is real cool!"
* so doing A is the right thing

That's intellectually lazy, no surrogate for an argument, and how it's usually encountered in political discourse, especially but not exclusively in the US.

 

Well, what you are complaining about has gone on for centuries. Citing an authority to increase the credibility of one's point of view is a principle method for establishing "ethos" within an argument or discourse, which according Aristotle is a perfectly acceptable rhetorical figure (notice how I just added ethos to the argument). In the ancient world, when rhetoric was a fine art, citing authorities went on endlessly.

But typically one has to establish him/herself as a credible authority on the topic and authority being used in order for the figure to be effective and the argument to be persuasive. Otherwise, the rhetorical turn could have the reverse effect, and the speaker could appear as an "idiot," as you are quick to point out, which is a whole other type of rhetorical device....

 

Morg, you haven't been to church recently, have you?

 

Okay, then - in this case I agree with you wholeheartedly (and belatedly), Morg. It does basically try to make the whole field of rhetoric forbidden, but I never liked it much, anyway.

"Citing from Authority" has already been mentioned as a reasoning gaffe in one of Nakia's threads, and I like the attention focussed on this fallacious behaviour.

And I also concur another big problem occurs when a 'historical quote' is taken out of its relevant context.

To drift momentarily from politics, take John Lennon's "bigger than Jesus" statement. He wasn't promoting himself or his band, or boasting. He was deploring the general 'loss of faith' at the time; that a simple little rock band could BE more interesting or important to people than God. But demagogues took only the short snippet and vilified him and his group for a statement they either never understood (which actually would have been commiserating with them) or deliberately misconstrued.

 

Ah, JE, citing Nakia: A good source - and it adds ethos to your comment as well.

 

Morgoroth, you are way off base on this one. The only question is whether the quote is appropriate. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn't. In either case the long dead author can neither complain nor compliment. Surely you can't expect us to junk 2500 years of quotations, usable on any occasion. "What is truth?" said jesting Pilate.

 

I don't expect you to junk anything, what I am saying is that quotes are often subjects for different inteprentations and are hold very little information or wisdom in them. Quoting is a very unintellectual way of making a point. You are assuming that the public is too stupid to get the point without reinforcing it with a historical quote, hence I find it a very inappropriate tactic.

People are in most cases intellectual enough to understand issues without meaningless quote, or atleast one would hope so.

In more casual instances quoting can be interesting. Quotes can be witty or funny or be a fundamental part of a good joke. Nothing wrong with that in general, but then this thread is in the AoLS, so this kind of quoting was really not the issue. I should have probably made that more clear.

 

I agree, but only in an "unintellectual" situation. Because in most situations, if one quotes an important source, it then finalizes the argument and brings it to a conclusion - no further argument needed because "so and so said...." That's really a cheap way winning.

In an academic situation it is vital to rely upon sources because acadmics understand that almost everything is derivative in some way. People have been having many of the same arguments, and disagreeing over many of the same issues for thousands of years. The only real differences are the contexts in which they occur. If an academic quotes Plato, there's a good chance that he/she is a Platonist, or that some of Plato's thinking is a part of that person's thought process (btw, Morg, you are forcing me to be half-way serious here, which I despise being this early in the morning).