John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion at all!!!”

[Bucky]

but then there's the full paragraph:

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion at all!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.

Just like we cringe when the wingnuts take quotes out of context to gratify their peculiar ideologies, we should be vigilant about making sure what we quote on our side is intellectually honest. One of my pet peeves is the spurious Mussolini quote asserting that fascism is corporatism.



See? Corporations are evil. Problem 1 with this is that the world corporatism refers to an ideology in which the state is treated like a single body, a "corpus," so that some people are rightly considered the heads (Mussolini and his top henchmen), some are the fingers and feet (the workers who should follow him unthinkingly), and others the specialized organs of the body (like the Party, the government, the army, and the bankers/industrialists/capitalists who the fascists needed to keep the people in line. Problem 2 with this quote is that Mussolini never said it.

[Nye Bevan]

1. But surely if it's on the internet it's probably true

[Bucky]

2. Where did you read that?

(I'm guessing the internet)