Daily Inspiration Quote by Serge Lang

Lang’s line lands like a chalk-snap in a seminar room: brisk, corrective, and a little contemptuous of the usual excuses. “Not here concerned with intent” is a refusal of the most common academic getaway car. In controversies, people plead motives (he meant well; she didn’t intend harm) as if good faith can launder sloppy claims. Lang reroutes the conversation to what can be tested, checked, and disciplined: “scientific standards.”

The real bite is in the inventory. Fact, opinion, hypothesis: three categories that modern discourse constantly smears together, often to protective effect. Dress an opinion up as a “just asking questions” hypothesis; treat a hypothesis as settled fact when it’s politically convenient; dismiss a fact as “mere opinion” when it’s inconvenient. Lang isn’t performing philosopher’s taxonomy for fun. He’s policing boundaries because boundary violations are how bad arguments survive.

Then he spikes it with “a hole in the ground,” a deliberately unglamorous fourth term. It’s an old-school Lang move: humor as knife. A hole in the ground isn’t just “wrong”; it’s a category error so basic it’s embarrassing. The joke implies a culture where people don’t merely disagree, they mis-handle the entire apparatus of reasoning.

Context matters: Lang was famously combative about rigor and about public standards of proof (including, controversially, in debates over AIDS science). That history complicates the quote’s clean moral posture. It reads as both a principled demand for clarity and a declaration of authority: I’m the one who gets to sort the facts from the holes. That tension is why it still crackles.