Wang Chong Quotes on Knowledge
Wang Chong (c. 27 – c. 100 CE), the Eastern Han philosopher whose Lunheng (Discourses Weighed in the Balance) gave classical Chinese thought its most thoroughgoing exercise in skeptical empiricism, attacks the cosmological correlations and supernatural narratives of the contemporary Han Confucian synthesis on the criterion of consistency with verifiable experience. The framework defends the case that the cognitive virtues are the patient testing of received opinion against observable phenomena and the willingness to abandon any claim — however authoritatively transmitted — that fails such testing, and the work supplies the principal classical Chinese precedent for the rationalist and naturalist tendencies of the later tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Wang Chong:
“What we call portents are nothing but the regular operation of nature.”
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Attributed to Wang Chong:
“The educated man should believe nothing on the authority of repetition alone.”
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Attributed to Wang Chong:
“Reason, not custom, is the proper measure of the truth of any claim.”
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“Will our Great Cultural Revolution be cursed? Certainly some people will curse it. And even 10 years or several decades later, there will be some people who will curse it.”
As quoted in 1974, "Wang Hongwen Dies in Beijing; A Member of the 'Gang of Four'" in The New York Times (5 August 1992) -
“Historical experience tells us that not only will the struggle between the two classes and the two roads in society at home inevitably find expression in our Party, but imperialism and social-imperialism abroad will inevitably recruit agents from within our Party in order to carry out aggression and subversion against us.”
Wikiquote -
“To study Marxism and criticize revisionism is our long-term task for strengthening the building of our Party ideologically.”
Wikiquote