Why the world still remembers Samuel Johnson...

...as opposed to the number of people who a hundred years from now will remember you and me.

I once gave a twelve-week Sunday School series on clear thinking and spent, if memory serves, a big chunk of one of my hours trying to explain why special pleading gets us into so much trouble and leads to many bad decisions. ("Special pleading" is the rhetorical tactic by which you take the facts that support your agenda, and ignore all the facts that would go to prove that you're being an ass.) Johnson, however, disposes of the point in a couple of sentences (emphases original):

He observed, a principal source of erroneous judgment was, viewing things partially and only on one side [which is to say, special pleading]: as for instance, fortune-hunters, when they contemplated the fortunes singly and separately, it was a dazzling and tempting object; but when they came to possess the wives and their fortunes together, they began to suspect that they had not made quite so good a bargain.