[Ads-l] "Rearranging Their Prejudices" Quote

[Peter Reitan]

1859: Precursor - "think they are thinking" under the influence of prejudices, but not in a pithy saying.

Charles Timothy Brooks, The Simplicity of Christ's Teachings: Set Forth in Sermons, Boston, Crosby, Nichols, 1859, page 60 (HathiTrust).

For, indeed, men too often think they are thinking [(italics in original)], when they are really not using, not applying their mind . . . .  And meanwhile, for the present . . . we let any power or authority that may, from one or another cause, chance to be in the ascendant, - public opinion or private prejudice, sympathy or antipathy, selfish wishes or superstitious fears, hereditary habit or the force of fashion, anything but our own calm and independent judgment, make up for us those opinions which do so much to color our whole atmosphere, and shape the whole current of our real life.  



"Think they are thinking" was also attributed to and used by the Suffragist Helen H. Gardener.  Review of Helen H. Gardener's New Book, The New Time, volume 1, number 2, July, 1893, page 65. (HathiTrust):
Persons who do not think very seriously, or who, as Helen Gardener says, only "think they are thinking," at odd and fugitive times, wonder how a woman, and a young woman at that, can write as Helen Gardener does unless she has had a personal experience of the things she writes.  As if the preacher who depicts the torments of the damned must have had these torments . . . .


Helen Gardener's comments before the New York County League of Women's Suffrage, 
responding to recent charges made by Cardinal Gibbons against women 
suffragists, The Free Thought Magazine, Volume 20, 1902, page 479 (HathiTrust):

"There are a great many grown up children in this droll old world." Gardener began. "They are mental infants.  They think they are thinking.  Some of these people are bishops, some are cardinals, but the infant is composed of the women 'antis,' who think they are thinking their little thinklets. . . .  Mrs. Stanton, the mother of the suffrage idea for women, has seven splendid sons and daughters . . . . Any could teach him the utter immorality of his own narrow-mindedness, which permits him to bear false witness against his neighbor."


Humor piece that might easily have appeared today, suggesting that Populists are more sensible than Democrats or Republicans, The New Time, Volume 2, page 114 (HathiTrust):

I confess with sorrow not unmixed with shame that there is just one partisan more densely ignorant than the average Democrat, and that is the average Republican.  Each absorbs his economic ideas from the empty eructations of flapdoodle orators and the impudent prevarications of a partisan press.  As a rule, they are born Democrats or Republicans, just as they are born Baptists or Presbyterians - blindingly follow the faith of their fathers. . . .  Such people ratiocinate by machinery.  Their heads are mere hurdy-gurdies and emit only nerve-destroying dissonances.  When they imagine that they are reasoning they are only remembering.  When they think they are thinking they imagine a vain thing.  The Populists are much better informed than are those who call them anarchists and cranks.


> Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2016 15:58:18 +0000
> From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
> Subject: "Rearranging Their Prejudices" Quote
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> 
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "Rearranging Their Prejudices" Quote
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> In the Yale Book of Quotations, 1st edition, I list the following quotation=
>  under Knute Rockne:
> 
> 
> Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their p=
> rejudices.
> 
> Quoted in Reader's Digest, Oct. 1927
> 
> 
> While working on the 2nd edition of the YBQ, I have realized that this quot=
> e was undoubtedly around before Rockne.  I would welcome any citations or l=
> eads pushing it back in time.  Probably "rearranging their prejudices", "re=
> arrange their prejudices", "rearranging his prejudices," etc. are the key p=
> hrases to search for.
> 
> 
> Fred Shapiro
> 
> 
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