"Consistency is the hobgoblin of narrow minds" --Obama 4/11/15
"The US is frightened of Iran, because it is a superpower now. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan. If the US blinks, Iran would destroy it." --Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah
If you are going to misquote someone you should at least do it accurately -- i.e. "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Which is not what Emerson said either, but at least the partial quote is correct so far as it goes.
I am not a snooty stickler for dotting Is and crossing Ts, but sometimes pernicious cases of "quoting" get my goat, and this particular misquote of Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of those cases. It makes me cringe whenever I hear it.
It makes me cringe because it so perverts what Emerson actually wrote. What he wrote is: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Note: not "consistency," but a "foolish consistency."
Consistency, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing at all. For example, I rather like the fact that the sun rises in the morning -- consistently. A foolish consistency however -- continually beating your head against a brick wall for example -- is no doubt something to be avoided.
That is not to say that I am a devoted fan of Ralph Waldo -- far from it. I find his prose to be all too often excruciatingly dry and convoluted, and a number of his ideas absurd, even dangerous. Nonetheless, he occasionally hits one out of the park and I can't help but applaud.
[Sidebar: Here are a couple of "hit" and "miss" examples from Emerson.
Hit "What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say."
Miss "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius."
(Actually that is sophomoric narcissism, not "genius").
It is perhaps worth mentioning that although Emerson's "foolish consistency" quote is a "hit" with me, the paragraph it comes from (in the essay "Self-Reliance") is not.]
Be that as it may, Obama misquoted Emerson in order to imply that the Israeli government has been both (1) unreasonably intransigent, and (2) closed-minded regarding Iran -- and the Israeli government has been that way consistently (which, it follows, makes them "narrow-minded").
But does it? Is it narrow-minded for Israel to consistently proclaim its right to defend its very existence? Is that a foolish consistency? No, of course it isn't. On the other hand, the Obama Administration's refusal to use the term "radical Islamic terrorist" -- now that's a foolish consistency, no doubt.
Born June 4, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. Worked as a commercial diver in the waters off of Scotland, India, and the United States. Worked overseas in the Merchant Marines. While attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student in 1998 was presented with the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award,” 1st place undergraduate division. (The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with money she won from successfully suing a national newspaper for libel). Awarded US Army, US Navy, South African, and Russian jump wings. Graduate of NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School, 1970). Member of Mensa, China Post #1, and lifetime member of the NRA and UDT/SEAL Association.
