White green abstract

Why Quote Others?

Why don’t we have the courage to asset a certain opinion without quoting or referring to someone else?

1. We are afraid of having skin in the game

First:

To state your opinion is to open yourself up to ridicule and criticism.

However if you quote someone else, you allay that sort of responsibility and skin in the game. Much safer to be a commentator than to have an original (your own) opinion. Why? If you quote someone else and you’re discovered as being wrong, you can always blame and scapegoat the other person. If you state your own opinion and you’re discovered as being foolish or false, you gotta pay the price of your own opinion.

2. Why does nobody have balls anymore?

Perhaps a sign of our emasculated culture? We aren’t encouraged to stake our own opinion in the ground? Or perhaps too much slavery to the tyranny of science; the fallacious thought that an ultimate true and false exist?