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

Famous quotes all 'hop' to bigger names and end up getting stuck to the most famous person in a given category and period. It's a winner-take-all market.

Thus mid-19th-century American folk wit hops to Abraham Lincoln (who, for example, never said the thing about fooling some of the people all of the time), late 19th/early 20th American wit hops to Mark Twain (who never said the thing about the coldest winter being summer in San Francisco), mid-20th-century artist wisdom goes to Picasso (who never said great artists steal), mid-20th-century scientist wisdom ends up at Einstein, and so on. The celebrity names are large planets, whose gravity pulls in the small fry.

As past eras recede, more names get forgotten, so quotes get reassigned to the last ones standing, who therefore seem wittier and wittier over time. Churchill was a witty fellow but even he didn't come up with "if I were your husband I'd drink it" or "up with which I will not put".

Occasionally a celebrity attribution is correct, but the odds are surprisingly low, and if there's no textual evidence, forget it—it's a hopper.

It used to bug me that quotes always get misattributed, but it's a process of nature if you think about it. And there's a related phenomenon: they get optimized as countless people repeat them. 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: the internet has accelerated all this. It's easier for a misattribution to propagate—Google any famous quote and you'll see page after page of dreck—but it's also easier to search original sources as well as link to real citations (like Quote Investigator and Wikiquote). So both sides win.

But it isn't squabbling. It's scholarly passion!

My favorite part of the quote is that it's talking about people.

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.

    Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

"The Bible is the source of liberty" - (not) Thomas Jefferson.

He seems to be a real common target to lend support to a claim. I think that says something about the mythology around the American Founding Fathers.

One of my favorite misattributions was this deliciously ironic juxtaposition Edward Abbey printed on the cover of his college newspaper:

"Man Will Never Be Free Until the Last King Is Strangled With the Entrails of the Last Priest. –LOUISA MAY ALCOTT" [1]

Actual source: Denis Diderot.

Pretty hilarious.

[1]http://notmytribe.com/2009/edward-abbey-quotes- louisa-may-alcott-85904.html

Example: The same words, spoken by two different persons, might come off as inspiring in one case and rude in the other.

Appeal to authority isn't fallacious if the authority appealed to is, you know, actually an authority.