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The quote is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte", "I made this one [the letter] longer, since I didn't have the leisure to make it shorter".

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In the spirit of generosity, I'll assume that was a very sly joke, and not an ironic misunderstanding of the point of the comment and the original post. Nice, I see what you did there!

I don't think it's a joke, it's a correction of attribution. The quote seems to have been attributed to a lot of people, but earliest mention of similar message is indeed from Blaise Pascal, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Quote Investigator is a gem. There's another page[1] on a similar quote:

> If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.

~ Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in The Operative Miller 23

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/01/short-speech/

That was not an example of dropping nuance.

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