"With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet"
About this Quote
A prophet delivers the spark; the commentator sells the firewood. Lichtenberg, a scientist with a satirist's eye for human vanity, is needling a perennial truth: predictions are rarely powerful on their own. Their social force comes later, when interpreters translate them into usable narratives, attach them to factions, and launder their ambiguities into certainty.
The line works because it flips the hierarchy we pretend to honor. We like to imagine the prophet as the heroic originator and the commentator as a mere footnote. Lichtenberg points out that public life often runs on the opposite economy. Prophecy is notoriously elastic: vague enough to survive, dramatic enough to travel. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug, because it creates space for the commentator to operate as curator, prosecutor, brand manager. The commentator decides what the prophet "really meant", what counts as fulfillment, which failures should be reclassified as metaphor, and which coincidences deserve promotion to destiny. In other words, the interpreter becomes the gatekeeper of meaning.
Context matters: late-18th-century Europe was awash in pamphlets, sermons, and salon arguments, where reputations were made less by discovery than by framing. As a working scientist, Lichtenberg knew how easily authority shifts from those who generate knowledge to those who package it. Read now, it lands as an early diagnosis of the modern attention economy: the loudest voice after the fact can eclipse the person who risked being wrong in the first place.
The line works because it flips the hierarchy we pretend to honor. We like to imagine the prophet as the heroic originator and the commentator as a mere footnote. Lichtenberg points out that public life often runs on the opposite economy. Prophecy is notoriously elastic: vague enough to survive, dramatic enough to travel. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug, because it creates space for the commentator to operate as curator, prosecutor, brand manager. The commentator decides what the prophet "really meant", what counts as fulfillment, which failures should be reclassified as metaphor, and which coincidences deserve promotion to destiny. In other words, the interpreter becomes the gatekeeper of meaning.
Context matters: late-18th-century Europe was awash in pamphlets, sermons, and salon arguments, where reputations were made less by discovery than by framing. As a working scientist, Lichtenberg knew how easily authority shifts from those who generate knowledge to those who package it. Read now, it lands as an early diagnosis of the modern attention economy: the loudest voice after the fact can eclipse the person who risked being wrong in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Georg
Add to List
