Negation Quotes
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
Logicians and others often state: “It is impossible to prove a negative.” For example, there were those who suggested that the HIV virus could not be transmitted by mosquitoes. They pointed to the lack of any research proving that misquotes could not transmit the virus as evidence that there was a likely risk. However, the scientist had shown that there was not a single case yet where mosquitoes could be implicated—even in areas of high mosquito infestation. But there is no way of doing an experiment to show that in no possible case or circumstance could a mosquito transmit the virus or a butterfly or hurricanes. Generally negatives cannot be established with logical rigor.
