If you’re on Facebook, chances are you’ve listed quotes that reflect your philosophy or outlook on life. They are quotes with which we agree from people we admire, but there’s never a real opportunity to showcase the ones we don’t like — unless you have your own blog and can write whatever you’d like on there, like I’m going to do, right now…
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” – Brian Littrel
This was spoken by one of the Backstreet Boys, who are not known to make their living primarily through proverbial wisdom. I can understand his sentiment but the sheer astronomical inaccuracy is a killer.
If you shoot for the moon and miss, you won’t land anywhere. You’ll most likely keep going until you hit something, and the chances of randomly hitting something in space are next to none. Stars aren’t really bunched together like daisies to be “landed” among, except if you’re talking about astronomical scales and not relative to the size of a human teenage girl — Ashley can’t jetpack around in space and encounter stars on either side of her whizzing by like lampposts in the motion parallax. They would be just as far apart from each other as when she was on earth.
On the off chance you “land” on a star (you won’t land on it as much as you will get burned into nothingness), it will be quite some time before that happens: the closest star is our sun, which is 150,000,000 km/93,205,678 miles. Sorry, Brian…there’s too much wrong with this for me to look past.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
What I think Colonel Sanders is saying, implicitly, is that those who do not travel end up prejudicial, bigoted, and narrow-minded (heretofore refered to as being a “schnoggleractor”). While that may be true in some cases, I don’t think the two are causally related. People who are schnoggleractic just may be averse to travel because of another, root cause. One does not sprout from the other but instead are borne from something else.
My main reason for disliking this is contextual. At the time of this quote (the mid 1860’s, in his book The Innocents Abroad) travel of the kind Twain did was safe and quick only if you had the money or knew the right people. Most of those of lesser income or standing, who had no access to such resources, were out of luck, and thus — depending how Twain’s intention for this sentence — suffered from chronic schnoggleractorism as our social fate.
“When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.” – Mariah Carey
Another contextual one. This one is so bad that it’s inconceivable that someone could say it, and Carey didn’t say it. That fact didn’t stop major news outlets from shirking due diligence and reporting it as legitimate.
“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” – Mohandas Gandhi
Aside from the grossly assumed collectivism, this one is confounding. You see, the love of animals is paradoxically anthrocentric: the casual animal lover will ascribe more value onto animals that are large, aesthetically pleasing, or exhibit human-like traits (dogs, seals, lions, dolphins, butterflies, whales), but they don’t seem to care that much for the welfare for ugly, alien ones (ants, snakes, spiders, mosquitos). Thusly, the casual animal lover finds something unsettling throwing kittens in a river but doesn’t bat an eyelash about the mass extermination of bugs from DDT and other insecticides. At what point in the animal kingdom should the concern begin? Until that question is settled, I’ll pass on this one.