
Falsely Attributed: Famous quotes and the people who didn’t say them - samclemens
http://laphamsquarterly.org/swindle-fraud/charts-graphs/falsely-attributed
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jkldotio
My favourite quote like this is "great minds discuss ideas; average minds
discuss events; small minds discuss people" which is usually attributed to
Eleanor Roosevelt, but this is disputed. However the nature of the quote
highlights that squabbling over the provenance of quotes is not a great minded
thing to do.

~~~
golergka
Every time I hear this quote, I remember that this quote is about people, so
the author, whoever he was, defined himself as small.

~~~
minot
No, the quote talks about ideas and trends, not individual persons. It is not
talking about persons. You could even say it is almost prescriptive in that it
is meant to urge you to do something or not do something. It is disguised as
descriptive but the facade is quite obvious.

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PaulRobinson
Quotes are words.

The content is all words.

So why is it a huge PNG?

Oh, oh, is it an "infographic"? Right, yes, the graphical content is so
important, of course…

~~~
unethical_ban
It's a copy of one of it's pages, as it's a quarterly journal with a less-
than-stellar web presence.

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huskyr
A wonderful resource for quotes and their origin is Quote Investigator:

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/)

They have countless posts with in-depth research and sources. Lovely to browse
for a couple of hours.

~~~
camillomiller
A couple of hours?! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Wait, I'm in the office...
I think I have them. "Compiling!!"

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bcook
The amount of misinformation on the internet is staggering.

-Abraham Lincoln

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davidgerard
I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to
misattribute it to Voltaire.

— Voltaire

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minimaxir
TVTropes has a rather large list of missattributed quotes:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeamMeUpScotty](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeamMeUpScotty)

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sjcsjc
The full Mencken quote is superb:

"The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a
gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no
special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for
getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search
out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to
give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The
tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words,
government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance
auction sale of stolen goods."

~~~
jmcqk6
>The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a
gang of men exactly like you and me.

This quote starts out really good, but runs off the rails very quickly.
Replace government with 'corporation' and everything is still true.

Basically you're describing humanity, and this type of criticism of government
isn't very useful in todays world. You have two choices today: your life is
controlled by the government or it's controlled by corporations. Or, I
suppose, you move out to the woods somewhere extremely remote (then you're
still going to be affected by everyone else due to pollution and global
warming, which know no boundaries).

So sure, you can rail against government all you want, but when it comes right
down to it, I would prefer a government I can at least participate in through
the democratic process than a corporation where my only influence is whether
or not I buy things from them.

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ekianjo
A more interesting thing would be to understand how the mis-attribution occurs
in the first place (and who is at the origin of it).

~~~
dang
Well now I have to tell you my theory, which I happen to have handy.

Famous quotes are a winner-take-all market: they all accrue to the most famous
person of a given category and period. Thus mid-19th-century American folk wit
goes to Abraham Lincoln (who, for example, never actually said the thing about
fooling some of the people all of the time), mid-20th-century artist wisdom
goes to Picasso (who never said great artists steal), mid-20th-century
scientist wisdom goes to Einstein, and so on. The big names are large planets;
their gravity pulls in the small stuff.

As past eras recede, more and more figures get forgotten, so the quotes get
reassigned to the last ones standing, who come to seem wittier and wittier
over time. Occasionally a folk attribution is even correct, but the odds are
surprisingly low, and if there's no textual evidence forget it.

It used to bug me that quotes always get misattributed, but it's almost a
process of nature if you think about it. And there's a related phenomenon:
they get optimized as countless people repeat them. Any inelegant bits that
are hard to remember or say out loud get dropped. An example is T.S. Eliot's
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" turning into "Good artists
borrow; great artists steal", which is so much catchier. It's as if detaching
from their origin frees them to evolve. Maybe the endgame is that they turn
into pure proverbs and enter the language itself.

Edit: oh, and the internet has accelerated all this. It's way easier for a
misattribution to propagate—Google any famous quote and you'll see page after
page of dreck—but it's also way easier to search original sources as well as
link to real citations (like Quote Investigator and Wikiquote). So both sides
win.

~~~
tjradcliffe
And the even catchier: "Mediocrity borrows, genius steals" which I've never
seen attributed to anyone. I think ideas that are really good tend to lose
thier attribution entirely because they stand on their own, so the bigger and
older the name attributed is, the more critical of the idea we should be.

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pmorici
It's interesting that there seem to be two broad categories of miss-
attribution. One where a quote is missattributed to someone other than the
original speaker and two where someone tries to give something they are saying
more weight by claiming a famous historical figure said it even though it is
of their own making.

~~~
pash
There are also a great many aphorisms and witticisms whose attribution seems
to gravitate towards an especially well known and respected eminence, although
actually said by someone lesser known. One example, widely misattributed to
Leonardo da Vinci:

    
    
        Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
    

(Those words were written by William Gaddis, in his novel _The Recognitions_.)

~~~
ekianjo
> One example, widely misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci:

Whoever believes that in the first place is also mistaken that such
concepts/wording as "sophistication" actually existed at the time.

~~~
jonny_eh
da Vinci was Italian, so of course those exact words couldn't be used.

~~~
dang
The roots in the quote are all Latin, so close enough. But the point isn't the
literal words, it's that "sophistication" is a modern concept that would have
seemed strange and probably repugnant in Leonardo's time.

I'm pretty sure that even Gaddis intended the phrase ironically. The
Recognitions is a novel about fraud.

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CurtMonash
I'd never heard the false attribution of the riddle/enigma/mystery quote. My
problem is always getting the order of the terms right. :)

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zafka
I find it amusing that the article is so quick to assign a quote to Glenn
Beck, just because they cannot verify his one attribution.

~~~
ska
What makes you say it was quick? Jefferson has been extensively studied and
presumably well cross referenced, this shouldn't be hard to check. Are you
assuming they didn't do the work?

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skc
As this is hacker news, the "640K ought to be enough for anyone" should
probably have made the list here at least.

~~~
theandrewbailey
We know who didn't say it, but last I checked, no one knows who did. Might it
be sarcastic fabrication?

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madez
Of what importance to a statement is the authorship? What is said speaks for
itself or it is appeal to authority.

~~~
rosser
I would emphatically disagree. Consider, in particular, the quote on the
linked page that's attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but was (apparently) coined
by Glenn Beck.

Appeal to authority isn't fallacious if the authority appealed to is, you
know, _actually an authority_.

~~~
ekianjo
> Appeal to authority isn't fallacious if the authority appealed to is, you
> know, actually an authority.

It is fallacious in any way, because it detracts the argument by imposing the
view of someone else without the need of justification.

~~~
rosser
"A logically valid argument from authority grounds a claim in the beliefs of
one or more authoritative source(s), whose opinions are likely to be true on
the relevant issue." [0]

"The appeal to authority is a fallacy of irrelevance when the authority being
cited is not really an authority." [1]

"Appealing to authority is valid when the authority is actually a legitimate
(debatable) authority on the facts of the argument." [2]

[0]
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority)

[1]
[http://www.skepdic.com/authorty.html](http://www.skepdic.com/authorty.html)

[2] [http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-
fallaci...](http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-
fallacies/21-appeal-to-authority)

~~~
ekianjo
I'd like to hear your definition of an authority. For example, how do you
define an authority in Economics when experts disagree on conclusions on both
sides? There can be no absolute authority for about anything, unless it's
actually demonstrated by facts and maths, and if that is the case then there
is no need to call for authority but simply explain the proven observations.

CQFD.

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cbd1984
"We really hate the blind." \- Lapham's Quarterly

flagged

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bruceb
A classic quote from Abraham Lincoln sums this up:
[http://lh3.ggpht.com/-9uSUrf74wFA/U2FE7ecM3AI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/yH...](http://lh3.ggpht.com/-9uSUrf74wFA/U2FE7ecM3AI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/yHGrwEFJh64/fb-
internet-lincoln-quote-960x720.jpg)

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MichaelCrawford
My grandmother Florence Swope frequently quoted some rich guy - Andrew
Carnegie or Rockefeller but I don't recall - as saying "If you're down to your
last hundred dollars, use it to buy a suit."

That struck me as good advice so I actually did just that one time, however it
set me back $450.00 at Nordstrom Rack. Real nice suit, I really enjoyed it.

Eventually I donated it to a thrift store in hopes that it might help someone
else get a job. This because I wore it to a bunch of interviews for coding
jobs. My experiences led me to conclude that no one believed that I was really
a coder, see because computer programmers never wear suits.

Carnegie or Rockefeller? I couldn't remember so I tried to find a citation,
and was unable to. I'm convinced now that grandma was just making that up.

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ExpiredLink
This is ... an image!?

