— Em tese – disse o senhor Lerond –, um erro judiciário é uma coisa inverossímil. Direi mesmo que é uma coisa impossível, uma vez que a lei oferece g… - Anatole France

That Pyrot had stolen the eighty thousand trusses of hay nobody hesitated for a moment to believe. No one doubted because the general ignorance in which everybody was concerning the affair did not allow of doubt, for doubt is a thing that demands motives. People do not doubt without reasons in the same way that people believe without reasons. The thing was not doubted because it was repeated everywhere and, with the public, to repeat is to prove. It was not doubted because people wished to believe Pyrot guilty and one believes what one wishes to believe. Finally, it was not doubted because the faculty of doubt is rare amongst men; very few minds carry in them its germs and these are not developed without cultivation. Doubt is singular, exquisite, philosophic, immoral, transcendent, monstrous, full of malignity, injurious to persons and to property, contrary to the good order of governments, and to the prosperity of empires, fatal to humanity, destructive of the gods, held in horror by heaven and earth. The mass of the Penguins were ignorant of doubt: it believed in Pyrot’s guilt and this conviction immediately became one of its chief national beliefs and an essential truth in its patriotic creed.

On reproche aux gens de parler d’eux-mêmes. C’est pourtant le sujet qu’ils traitent le mieux.

A people under the menace of war and of invasion is very easy to govern. It does not claim social reforms, it does not cavil over armaments or military equipment. It pays without haggling, it ruins itself at it, and that is excellent for the syndicates, the financiers, and the heads of industry to whom patriotic terrors open an abundant source of gain.