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There is an interesting new post up at Crooked Timber by Corey Robin. He has long been obsessed with running down the truth about quips and aphorisms attributed to famous people that they didn't really say.
Some of his examples include:
Also this one:
Some of his examples include:
- "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke)
- "Whoever is not a liberal [or a socialist or a progressive] when he is twenty has no heart; whoever is not a conservative when he is thirty has no brain." (Wrongly attributed to Churchill)
- "America is great because she is good." (Wrongly attributed to Tocqueville)
The comments to the post have many more examples from the typically erudite crowd there. One quotes a T-shirt he saw: “The trouble with ‘quotes’ on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine” -Abraham LincolnBut the more I’ve thought about the [wrongly attributed statement] the more charming I’ve found it. Because in many ways the WAS is a tribute to the democratic genius of the crowd. Someone famous says something fine—Burke did write, . . . “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”—and some forgotten wordsmith, or more likely wordsmiths, through trial and error, refashions it over time into something finer: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Which is really quite fine.
The false attribution: it’s our democratic poetry.
Also this one:
“Fake quotations are pithier, more dramatic, more on point, than the things people usually say in real life. It’s not surprising that they are often the survivors of the evolutionary battle for mindshare."
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