Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Truth, Lichtenberg implies, is not a self-propelled substance; it has to be staged. The line reads like an Enlightenment corrective to the pious fantasy that facts, once spoken, naturally win. Coming from an 18th-century scientist and aphorist, it also carries a sly awareness of the new public sphere taking shape around him: salons, pamphlets, journals, and the early machinery of mass persuasion. In that world, truth competes with fashion, wit, and rhetoric. “Clad in new garments” is doing double work: it flatters truth as something enduring while admitting it’s socially vulnerable, needing costume to get past the door.

The subtext is almost modern: the obstacle isn’t ignorance so much as attention. Lichtenberg is conceding that audiences don’t meet ideas in a vacuum; they meet them through language, metaphors, formats, and prevailing anxieties. The “garments” could be a new analogy, a new medium, a new moral frame, a different set of examples. This isn’t a license for dishonesty so much as a warning about delivery. Scientists can be right and still be ignored if they speak in yesterday’s idiom.

There’s a quiet cynicism here too. Dressing truth suggests both translation and marketing, a nod to how easily presentation shades into manipulation. Lichtenberg’s intent sits in that tension: respect the permanence of truth, but don’t worship its nakedness. If you want your era to hear you, you have to meet it where it is, even when “where it is” is aesthetically fickle and politically noisy.