
Don’t believe quotation websites - luu
http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2016/01/26/dont-believe-quotation-websites/
======
dang
But do trust this one, it's fab:
[http://quoteinvestigator.com](http://quoteinvestigator.com). I mean the top
post there right now is that "a million deaths is a statistic" traces to
Beilby Porteus, a classics scholar from 1759. How can you beat that?

Also, Wikiquote is good as a base.

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weinzierl
It's not only quotation websites. In Germany "If I Had More Time, I Would Have
Written a Shorter Letter" is a well-known quote from Goethe - except that it
isn't from Goethe. To the best of my knowledge it is from Blaise Pascal and it
took me about an hour of research to be confident enough use the quote with
this attribution.

This was way too much time spent for a simple quotation, so my question is: Is
there a reliable canonical source for quotations? Maybe something good
journalists use?

I know there are several quotation dictionaries but are they any good?

~~~
thomasahle
Interesting. I've always heard that quote ascribed to Niels Bohr.

Perhaps he was just the first Dane to use it. I guess in older times, you
could get credit for a quote if you were the first in a country to use it.
From [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-
letter/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/) it looks
like Benjamin Franklin was among the first Americans. But then again, what can
we really trust?

Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it.

~~~
dang
> _But then again, what can we really trust?_

Textual evidence. The first demonstrable text wins, until an earlier is found.
Sometimes it's fuzzy, because quotes morph (they get pithier over time). But
most of the time it's clear enough, and the techniques for studying it are
well understood.

Edit: The same is true in reverse, too: if a famous person really said X, it
will be easy to find a precise textual source for X by googling. I don't mean
a website claiming they said it (those are legion), but the original text,
e.g. from their collected works, or an original newspaper interview. Since
they're famous, that territory will have been trodden many times and there
will be websites linking to it. Therefore if you can't find it, the famous
person probably didn't say it. “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence”
(hey, I wonder who said that one?) really works in this case.

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Tomte
There's a book that only includes researched and vetted quotations:
Respectfully quoted: A dictionary of quotations requested from the
Congressional Research Service

------
jetskindo
If you create a website with wrongly attributed quotes Google will pick it up.
And the more people complain and link to your website as incorrect the more
popular it will get and eventually people just start making memes and sharing
on all social networks and then the quotes becomes true in the eyes of the
googlers.

~~~
sosuke
If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then
does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?

~~~
JadeNB
> If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then
> does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?

I think that's funny as a question, but has the wrong premise. There is no
'actual' meaning of words; they have meaning only by mass human consensus.
(What is the actual meaning of 'flumbiliable'?) By contrast, there _is_ an
'actual' first utterer of a quote, whether or not there is any consensus on
his or her identity.

(I suppose that you could argue, though, that it is only mass observation of a
quote that makes it a quote _per se_ , rather than just something I said; if I
mutter something under my breath, and it later occurs as a widely quoted line
in a movie, then should it be attributed to me, to the screenwriter, or to the
character who said it?)

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TazeTSchnitzel
WikiQuote is quite reliable, despite what you'd think. If I hear a quote and
want to know who _actually_ said it, WikiQuote usually has the answer, or can
at least tell me it was _mis_ attributed.

------
yann63
"Ceci n'est pas une citation"

\- René Magritte

("this is not a quote")

~~~
huac
though, in magritte's case, the visual-linguistic paradox is central; to claim
that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe requires the pipe to exist as a
physical, real object. in this case, a citation is a linguistic creation,
which can be faked but cannot exist as the real.

</nerdrant>

------
bshimmin
Relatedly, Martin Porter (of Porter stemmer fame) has a great pair of essays
on the famous Burke quote about the triumph of evil (which, of course, he
never said), starting with
[http://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html](http://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html)

------
dmd76
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win." \- Not Gandhi

~~~
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678282)

------
bcook
Though it may seem fallacious, information garnered through the interweb is
commonly infallible.

-Abraham Lincoln

Edit: Honestly, downvote this. HN is better than stupid, panderous posts like
this.

~~~
pluma
Seriously? It's actually by Oscar Wilde.

~~~
coldcode
From a tweet by him so it's probably fake.

~~~
dmichulke
I hear his account got hacked but I don't know whether it was before the quote
or before the denial

------
LeonM
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

~~~
wodenokoto
I always considered that quote something the rest of the world made up in
jest, because in retrospect, that wasn't enough memory and it was annoying. im
kinda surprised people apparently think it is something _anybody_ ever
actually said.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
And if anyone said it, it wouldn't be Bill Gates, because it wasn't Microsoft
who set the memory limits of the IBM PC.

------
danieltillett
"If you have heard of the person to whom the quote is attributed then it is
wrong."

\- Moses

------
RyanMcGreal
"I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

\- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ironically, this quotation is itself routinely taken out of context, as it was
being applied specifically to writers who fall back on quotation when
discussing the subject of immortality.

