There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of distinguishing between one thing and another. There may have been, though I never came across them in life or literature, some kind of clodhoppers who believed that every legend was true. But we shall be a much stupider kind of clodhoppers if we believe that every legend is legendary. In either case the effort which human laziness resists is that of drawing a distinction [...] the bother is that one has to use one's brains.

-March 14, 1914, Illustrated London News