3 ms·

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have” - Thomas Jefferson

• gruseom 16y ago
  Jefferson didn't say that. It's one of those bromides that get misattributed to a famous dude and then spread faster. According to Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson), the actual source is Stephen Leacock's Literary Lapses. (Side note: Leacock is the Canadian Mark Twain, though not nearly as sharp, which is about what you'd expect from a Canadian Mark Twain.) But Literary Lapses is in the public domain (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt) and it's easy to verify that the quote isn't there either. So we have a misattribution squared. I find this little domain of fake quotes fascinating. It's one area where web search is totally broken. Search any of these quotes (like the famous fake Gandhi one about "First they ignore you") and Google will happily serve you ream after ream of crappy web pages all repeating the same mistake. Or perhaps you'll get some pages saying a quote was Benjamin Franklin and others saying it was Einstein (they're both wrong). This is a weakness of web search: stuff that gets repeated often enough (as catchy misquotes certainly do - that's what they're optimized for) becomes the answer, drowning out the truth. Presumably the antidote to social-proof-driven search is some kind of trust-based system. As far as quotes go, Wikiquote seems to be emerging as an authoritative place you can use to check up on things. But it's a bad sign that the above citation turned out wrong.