11 Comments

Handle's Law is, "The better the quote, the more likely it's apocryphal."

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I was always told the second Astor/Churchill exchange was Astor and F E Smith if that helps.

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The Astor-Churchill stuff looks like music hall comedy or the later talkies screwball comedies.

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Who is the most often, on the internet, misattributed? I vote for George Carlin.

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Oh my, I really did think the Keynes quotes were real.

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My favourite is from Frédéric Bastiat and reads "If goods and services do not cross borders, soldiers will". However, it does not appear anywhere in his Complete Works and no audio recording was left of it...

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Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023

I think your collection is much less egotistical than my collection of quotes that *I've* said, that I also don't recall borrowing from anyone else. A slice:

-- Not all religion comes labeled as such. --

-- If you argue with someone about what they're really thinking, you will lose. --

-- An argument over which political party is more corrupt is like an argument over whose house is more on fire. --

-- The bias of a source isn't just in the falsehoods it tells you, but also in the truths it leaves out. --

-- Bias happens *even when the source wants to avoid it*. It's inherent to the venue. There's only so many minutes in the program, inches on the broadsheet. Even a website, which one might think affords all the space one might need, has only so much you can put at the top before the reader loses interest. In the end, you are fighting for the audience's attention span, and any story that grabs it is at the expense of another. --

I am quite sure the insights from these were discovered earlier. (I could argue that *every* quotable quote necessarily has this property.) It makes me wonder if there is a database out there that attempts to extract the "key insight" of popular quotes, and index them on that insight, such that you could dig up quotes with insights that are close. Consider:

-- You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. --

-- You can lead a baker to dough, but you can't make him bake it. --

Similar insights, but perhaps not identical, but it'd be interesting if a database could retrieve insights by similarity. At best, all the ones I've seen index by keyword or author or "topic" - leading to quotes about fish that have nothing to do with fish, etc.

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Let me add some of my own.

-- Anyone more concerned with trust than trustworthiness is not to be trusted.

-- Never trust anyone in a clean lab coat.

-- Logic is fragile, a single mistake anywhere in a chain of arguments renders the result junk.

-- Criticism isn't censorship.

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Great stuff.

This one always annoys me: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/?amp=1

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Worth reading through the website if you've never seen it before. Extremely well researched.

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