In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. —Mark Twain1

1 Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3, The Complete and Authoritative Edition, ed. by Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 253.