Dr. Keith Crainshaw says:
May 13 2016 at 8:18 am
I noted that you put your availability for interview on Twitter, disgusting that the media only responded with the News at Ten.
That’s just fun but this?
John D says:
May 13 2016 at 6:21 pm
Now I feel guilty! Richard and Keith – you’re both right. It’s always better to light a candle than to curse the darkness (apparently Eleanor Roosevelt said that).
Might be a little older than that laddie.
Pterry: “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”
It’s one of my favourite Peanuts cartoons.
Linus comes in with a lit candle and says;
It’s always better to light a candle than to curse the darkness
Charlie Brown says “That’s very wise, but there are always those who’ll disagree with you.”
And outside Lucy is shouting “YOU STUPID DARKNESS!”
The English Wesleyan minister William Lonsdale Watkinson used the expression in The Supreme Conquest, and other sermons preached in America, 1907:
I’m pretty sure it’s Old Testament. Proverbs maybe?
As a useful rule of thumb, the attribution of any pithy saying to a famous American is likely to be wrong. And not just Americans.
My favourite is “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, as Mark Twain’s daddy said.” Mind you, I’ve also seen an American attribute that one to The Good Book.
Chinese proverb apparently:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/3489.html
Don’t think it’s OT. Quite probably spoken by someone who had imbibed the OT though.
Even more general rules: if some quote was originaly spoken by
– a sagacious American
– a physicist, particularly on something other than physics, and double if they won a Nobel,
– Winston Churchill
– the ancient Chinese
then odds are, in fact, it wasn’t them.
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
Tim Worstall – “I’m pretty sure it’s Old Testament. Proverbs maybe?”
Wouldn’t the Old Testament say something slightly different? More like “Rather than curseth the darkneth (because it seems everyone talked a little Gay back then), it is better to burn down a village of Canaanites together with all their women, children and livestock.”
The wise man raiseth the bushel to Heaven, that hath a lamp thereunder, that he might not stubbeth his toe in the darkness and cry out to the Lord.
I’m sure I remember that from Sunday school. There might have been virgin in it too, there very often was.