8 ms·

Falsely Attributed: Famous quotes and the people who didn’t say them

62 points by samclemens 11y ago

bruceb 11y ago
A classic quote from Abraham Lincoln sums this up: http://lh3.ggpht.com/-9uSUrf74wFA/U2FE7ecM3AI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/yHGrwEFJh64/fb-internet-lincoln-quote-960x720.jpg http://lh3.ggpht.com/-9uSUrf74wFA/U2FE7ecM3AI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/yH...
madez 11y ago
Of what importance to a statement is the authorship? What is said speaks for itself or it is appeal to authority.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  Don't agree on the general case, sender makes a whole lot of difference in a communication context. Example: The same words, spoken by two different persons, might come off as inspiring in one case and rude in the other.
  - cooper12 11y ago
    Yeah, a good example of this was when on people posted nazi quotes on reddit's /r/atheism [0] and they were upvoted immensely only because they were attributed to Richard Dawkins, whom the userbase respects. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/r6l5t/people_keep_submitting_nazi_quotes_to_ratheism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/r6l5t/peopl...
- rosser 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      "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-fallacies/21-appeal-to-authority http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        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.
  - spdustin 11y ago
    I think he means that the name dropping is used by someone (e.g. Glenn Beck) who wants to bypass your bullshit detector by attaching an authority figure to the bullshit they're trying to pass off as important, relevant, or supportive of their view. Whether or not the authority figure attributed is the actual author is irrelevant, it's the intention behind the use of this appeal to authority. To grossly paraphrase George Carlin (who was referring to racial epithets[0]): There's nothing wrong with the mis-attribution of a quote, it's the fraudulent use of a famous authority figure by a trickster you ought to be concerned about. [0] from Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, "They're Only Words" (track 14)
- olavk 11y ago
  It is pretty important if you are actually interested in history and in the thoughts of persons of historical significance. Misattribution of quotes is a distortion of history.
jkldotio 11y ago
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.
- dang 11y ago
  There's a good page on that one: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/ But it isn't squabbling. It's scholarly passion!
- olavk 11y ago
  If you are interested in the history of ideas, it makes a big difference if a quote is by the real Da Vinci or some 20th century novelist.
- golergka 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - voxic11 11y ago
    That's not what the quote means by people. It means specific people, like celebrity or water cooler gossip, not ideas about people in general like psychology.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > "great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" My favorite part of the quote is that it's talking about people.
pmorici 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.
    - dang 11y ago
      Indeed, and the closest equivalents (like sophistry) were taken for granted as a bad thing.
    - jonny_eh 11y ago
      da Vinci was Italian, so of course those exact words couldn't be used.
      - dang 11y ago
        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.
huskyr 11y ago
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 11y ago
  A couple of hours?! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Wait, I'm in the office... I think I have them. "Compiling!!"
- camillomiller 11y ago
  A couple of hours?! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Wait, I'm in the office... I think I have them. "Compiling!!"
ekianjo 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - 11y ago
minimaxir 11y ago
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
davidgerard 11y ago
I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire. — Voltaire
ExpiredLink 11y ago
This is ... an image!?
PaulRobinson 11y ago
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 11y ago
  It's a copy of one of it's pages, as it's a quarterly journal with a less-than-stellar web presence.
CurtMonash 11y ago
I'd never heard the false attribution of the riddle/enigma/mystery quote. My problem is always getting the order of the terms right. :)
zafka 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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?
bcook 11y ago
The amount of misinformation on the internet is staggering. -Abraham Lincoln
skc 11y ago
As this is hacker news, the "640K ought to be enough for anyone" should probably have made the list here at least.
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  We know who didn't say it, but last I checked, no one knows who did. Might it be sarcastic fabrication?
sjcsjc 11y ago
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 11y ago
  >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.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
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.
cbd1984 11y ago
"We really hate the blind." - Lapham's Quarterly flagged

62 points by samclemens 11y ago

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

madez 11y ago

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

reitanqild 11y ago
Don't agree on the general case, sender makes a whole lot of difference in a communication context. Example: The same words, spoken by two different persons, might come off as inspiring in one case and rude in the other.
- cooper12 11y ago
  Yeah, a good example of this was when on people posted nazi quotes on reddit's /r/atheism [0] and they were upvoted immensely only because they were attributed to Richard Dawkins, whom the userbase respects. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/r6l5t/people_keep_submitting_nazi_quotes_to_ratheism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/r6l5t/peopl...
rosser 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    "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-fallacies/21-appeal-to-authority http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      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.
- spdustin 11y ago
  I think he means that the name dropping is used by someone (e.g. Glenn Beck) who wants to bypass your bullshit detector by attaching an authority figure to the bullshit they're trying to pass off as important, relevant, or supportive of their view. Whether or not the authority figure attributed is the actual author is irrelevant, it's the intention behind the use of this appeal to authority. To grossly paraphrase George Carlin (who was referring to racial epithets[0]): There's nothing wrong with the mis-attribution of a quote, it's the fraudulent use of a famous authority figure by a trickster you ought to be concerned about. [0] from Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, "They're Only Words" (track 14)
olavk 11y ago
It is pretty important if you are actually interested in history and in the thoughts of persons of historical significance. Misattribution of quotes is a distortion of history.

jkldotio 11y ago

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.

dang 11y ago
There's a good page on that one: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/ But it isn't squabbling. It's scholarly passion!
olavk 11y ago
If you are interested in the history of ideas, it makes a big difference if a quote is by the real Da Vinci or some 20th century novelist.
golergka 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- voxic11 11y ago
  That's not what the quote means by people. It means specific people, like celebrity or water cooler gossip, not ideas about people in general like psychology.
cbd1984 11y ago
> "great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" My favorite part of the quote is that it's talking about people.

pmorici 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.
  - dang 11y ago
    Indeed, and the closest equivalents (like sophistry) were taken for granted as a bad thing.
  - jonny_eh 11y ago
    da Vinci was Italian, so of course those exact words couldn't be used.
    - dang 11y ago
      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.

huskyr 11y ago

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 11y ago
A couple of hours?! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Wait, I'm in the office... I think I have them. "Compiling!!"
camillomiller 11y ago
A couple of hours?! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Wait, I'm in the office... I think I have them. "Compiling!!"

ekianjo 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago

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

davidgerard 11y ago

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

ExpiredLink 11y ago

This is ... an image!?

PaulRobinson 11y ago

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 11y ago
It's a copy of one of it's pages, as it's a quarterly journal with a less-than-stellar web presence.

CurtMonash 11y ago

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

zafka 11y ago

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 11y ago
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?

bcook 11y ago

The amount of misinformation on the internet is staggering. -Abraham Lincoln

skc 11y ago

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

theandrewbailey 11y ago
We know who didn't say it, but last I checked, no one knows who did. Might it be sarcastic fabrication?

sjcsjc 11y ago

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 11y ago
>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.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

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.

cbd1984 11y ago

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