Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg slips a scalpel into what sounds like a compliment. “Man is the noblest creature” is the kind of self-congratulatory slogan Enlightenment Europe loved to print, preach, and build empires around. He doesn’t refute it head-on; he undermines it with a mock-empirical “inference” that’s really a punchline: the only evidence offered is that nobody else has filed a rebuttal.

The joke works because it mimics the language of rational proof while exposing how often “reason” is just a costume for vanity. If humans are noble, the argument goes, surely we can demonstrate it. Instead we treat our own verdict as self-authenticating, like a monarch declaring himself legitimate because no one in the room is allowed to disagree. Lichtenberg’s sly move is to point out the asymmetry: animals can’t “contest” human claims in human forums, with human rules, in human prose. Our dominance creates the silence, then we cite the silence as validation.

Coming from a scientist with an aphorist’s bite, the line also pokes at the era’s confidence in classification - ranking species, ranking peoples, ranking minds. It’s an early warning about circular reasoning dressed up as observation, a critique that still lands in any modern debate where the powerful treat lack of opposition as proof of rightness. The subtext isn’t that humans are ignoble; it’s that human certainty is often just a victory lap taken in an empty courtroom.