In Skeptic V. 9 No. 2 (2002), p. 29, you attribute the following
quotation to Arthur Schopenhauer:

	"All truth passes through three stages:  First, it is
	ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is
	accepted as self-evident."

Despite much effort, including consulting two Schopenhauer scholars, I
have not been able to find this exact quotation in any of
Schopenhauer's writings.  Apparently Schopenhauer never said it.

He did, however, say something roughly along those lines, in the
preface to the first edition of his 1818 book, _Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung_.  In E. F. J. Payne's English translation his remark reads:

	"To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed
	between the two long periods during which it is condemned as
	paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial."

So what is the original source of the quotation you printed?  I don't
know for sure, but it appears in a 1981 New York Times interview with
author Edward Packard and a popular book of quotations, _The Harper
Book of Quotations_, both times attributed to Schopenhauer.  It is
extremely popular, quoted in many newspaper articles and Internet web
sites, and is proffered in support of discredited claims about
acupuncture, repressed memory, Holocaust denial, or the dangers of
vaccination.  It was even cited in a 1989 opinion in a Florida court
case!

Over the last few years, I have documented the existence of similar
quotations about the stages of truth by George Bernard Shaw, Thomas
Henry Huxley, Karl Ernst von Baer, John A. Zahm, William James, Elbert
Hubbard, J. B. S.  Haldane, Arthur C. Clarke, Adrienne Zihlman, John
Barrow, and Dean Radin.

Analogous remarks have also been attributed to Louis Agassiz, William
Whewell, Gustave Le Bon, Montaigne, and Charles Kettering but I have
not yet been able to verify these.

The moral is that we should be skeptical, even concerning quotes about
skepticism!


Jeffrey Shallit
Department of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario  N2L 3G1
Canada