I have a pet interest in cuckoo quotes: lines that sound good that get falsely attributed to a famous person. (For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

I have a pet interest in cuckoo quotes: lines that sound good that get falsely attributed to a famous person. (For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678282 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678282) As an experiment, I'm going to say that this sounds like one of those to me. It feels too much like a modern species, not something from the Renaissance. Now I'm going to go check and report back. :) Edit: here's what I found. Wikiquote lists it as "unsourced". Google Books shows the phrase as appearing in a few dozen recent inspirational and self-help books (Marry Your Baby Daddy, anyone?), but no scholarly or historical ones (http://books.google.com/books?q=%22greater+danger+for+most+of+us%22&btnG=Search+Books http://books.google.com/books?q=%22greater+danger+for+most+o...). Google web search comes up only with reams of those awful junky quotation sites. It's possible that the wording is a modern translation of an authentic quote, but in general, if 5-10 minutes of Googling doesn't come up with an original source for a famous quote by a famous genius, the odds are against it. It's still a great line.