Hypatia Quotes
In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
She herself was later killed by a mob incited by the religious leaders of her day.
If someone repeats a lie, you can show them the logic and facts of the situation and persuade them often. But if they are ideologically wedded to an idea, it is difficult if not impossible to change their mind, as their belief is an ideology, not a conclusion.
In politics, the most frequent examples are conspiracy theories and economic and/or political principles that are derived from ideology with little or mothing real from which to provide a deducible justification. An explanation that seems not to be contradicted is not an explanation that could be called true unless there is some evidence to support it, not a lack of evidence to refute it. There are millions of propositions in the world for which there is no evidence to reject them, but that does not make them true." 3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
See Otis Singletary {585931} for a different expression of the same idea and John Stuart Mill {607508} for the earlier expression. The earliest expression of the idea can be found in the Bhagavad Gita {594723}
Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrine female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She is known to have written a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.
