History
Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.
Godwin's law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. "Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust," Godwin has written.
Read more about this topic: Godwin's Law
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmonyperiods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)