Index of Popular Fallacies
POPULAR FALLACIES
The weakest part of
mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth. It is the trite
consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked
out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do
the owner no good. But the rogues of this world -- the prudenter
part of them, at least -- know better; and, if the observation
had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time
to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of
the fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly
go," is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave,
when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always
find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away,
as the poets will have it or that all gold glides, like thawing
snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alienated
to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery quality.
But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the
denunciators have been vain to postpone the prophecy of refundment
to a late posterity.