Roger Scruton on the Art of the Aphorism

Speaking Neatly. Excerpt:

FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More significant than Wilde's, on account of its influence, is Marx's dismissal of religion as "the opium of the people." For this implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe the wounds of society, and that there is some other condition to which humanity might advance in which religion would no longer be needed. Both those implications are false, but they are boiled into a stock cube as tasty as any that has been seen on the intellectual menu. How many would-be intellectuals have dissolved this cube into their prose and given their thought, in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, a specious air of wisdom?

Permit me a quibble.  Should we call a striking formulation lifted from a wider context an aphorism?  I don't think so.  An aphorism by my lights is a pithy observation intended by its author to stand alone.  Accordingly, Marx's famous remark is not an aphorism.  The wider context is provided here.