Post by robeiae on Jul 6, 2017 16:27:15 GMT -5
This is a long-running issue for me, the mistaken attribution of "great quotes" to people who never actually said them or who didn't actually say them first.
One of the best ones in this regard is Gerald Ford's supposedly great quote "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." Sometimes people say Goldwater said this, but then someone usually comes along and says "no, it was Ford. Ford did say the above in a 1974 address to Congress. Wikiquote, Brainyquote, and plenty of other "sources" attribute it to Ford.
And yet: books.google.com/books?id=PFdODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT67&lpg=PT67#v=onepage&q&f=false
That's a book by Paul Harvey, Remember These Things, published in 1952.
And it's not just everyday people who screw up here. There was a Mark Twain article some time back (in 2012) that attributed a bunch of stuff to him incorrectly. Here's a piece about that article: www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/12/10/fake_twain_quotes_and_other_hazards_of_twitter_116376.html
But people just aren't learning. Anywhere. Witness CNN's quote fest on twitter to celebrate the 4th (sorry, CNN):
It opens with a quote from Lincoln that is simply wrong. Lincoln didn't actually say that. He said something similar, but that's not nearly good enough. And the next quote from Franklin is also wrong. Frankiln did indeed write that in one of the Silence Dogood letters, but he was specifically quoting someone else, the authors of Cato's Letters. To whit: www.constitution.org/cl/cato_015.htm
Which of course means that Franklin did it right, without the benefit of the internet, while a modern person did it wrong...
One of the best ones in this regard is Gerald Ford's supposedly great quote "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." Sometimes people say Goldwater said this, but then someone usually comes along and says "no, it was Ford. Ford did say the above in a 1974 address to Congress. Wikiquote, Brainyquote, and plenty of other "sources" attribute it to Ford.
And yet: books.google.com/books?id=PFdODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT67&lpg=PT67#v=onepage&q&f=false
That's a book by Paul Harvey, Remember These Things, published in 1952.
And it's not just everyday people who screw up here. There was a Mark Twain article some time back (in 2012) that attributed a bunch of stuff to him incorrectly. Here's a piece about that article: www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/12/10/fake_twain_quotes_and_other_hazards_of_twitter_116376.html
Nov. 30 was the great writer’s birthday, as it happens, and I’d mentioned a few of his pithy observations in a morning essay I’d written myself. But Arianna kept tweeting out “Twain” quotes -- it seemed she was touting a slideshow on the Huffington Post -- so I clicked on it with a sense of trepidation.
My fears were well-placed.
What awaited the reader were 27 quotes, most of which were not Twain, starting with the first one: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. . . . It was here first.” Although that sounds vaguely like Twain, it’s actually from Robert Jones Burdette, a Union private from Illinois who after the Civil War became a prominent Iowa newspaper humorist and then a California pastor.
If my sleuthing is correct, only 11 of the 27 were authentic. The rest were purloined from other writers, fabricated out of whole cloth, or of unknown derivation, but not traceable to Mark Twain.
My fears were well-placed.
What awaited the reader were 27 quotes, most of which were not Twain, starting with the first one: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. . . . It was here first.” Although that sounds vaguely like Twain, it’s actually from Robert Jones Burdette, a Union private from Illinois who after the Civil War became a prominent Iowa newspaper humorist and then a California pastor.
If my sleuthing is correct, only 11 of the 27 were authentic. The rest were purloined from other writers, fabricated out of whole cloth, or of unknown derivation, but not traceable to Mark Twain.
It opens with a quote from Lincoln that is simply wrong. Lincoln didn't actually say that. He said something similar, but that's not nearly good enough. And the next quote from Franklin is also wrong. Frankiln did indeed write that in one of the Silence Dogood letters, but he was specifically quoting someone else, the authors of Cato's Letters. To whit: www.constitution.org/cl/cato_015.htm
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the right of another; and this is the only check which it ought to suffer, the only bounds which it ought to know.