If you need people to take an idea or a movement seriously, a well-placed quote by Gandhi, The Buddha, Confucius, Winston Churchill, or Albert Einstein can help your cause. It’s surprisingly common for quotes to be misattributed to these and other luminaries.
In his book, The Hidden Habits of Genius, Professor Craig Wright dissects genius and our society’s pursuit of pursuing and identifying genius. (I also recommend Dr. Wright’s class, The Nature of Genius on Coursera.) We want geniuses. We want our cause to have the backing of genius so it’s no surprise that supportive words are put in the mouths of bona fide geniuses. These misattributions are often effective because they are plausible. It’s only recently that we could electronically (and quickly) scan every word written or uttered by the aforementioned geniuses – and others – to verify the accuracy of quotes.
The passage below is attributed to Albert Einstein in many places, but there is no known source tying it to him. The possible origins of the question, “Is the universe friendly?” can be traced in a footnote to Emil Carl Wilm‘s 1912 book The Problem of Religion on p. 114: ‘A friend proposed to the late F. W. H. Myers the following question: “What is the thing which above all others you would like to know? If you could ask the Sphinx one question, and only one, what would the question be?” After a moment’s silence, Myers replied: “I think it would be this: Is the universe friendly?”‘
It’s possible that Einstein was even familiar with the book. Wilm, a Polish-born American philosopher, was a faculty member who wrote for a popular audience.
Here’s the misattributed quote. It does seem like a mashup of Einstein’s words and things Einstein might have said. It is worth a read. Words don’t need to come from a genius to get to the heart of the matter.
__________
“I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.
“For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.
“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.
“But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”
__________
I am going with friendly. I feel like there is no other good choice. Here’s an article to help you decide: Is the Universe Friendly? You Decide! | Psychology Today.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
