Tracing Quotations
Eleanor Roosevelt? Reader’s Digest? Apocryphal? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: There is a remarkably insightful statement about self-esteem that is usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, the diplomat and former First Lady: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. This is one of my favorite quotations, but I have not been able to determine …
Continue reading “No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Consent”
George S. Kaufman? Eddie Fisher? Clifton Fadiman? Dick Cavett? Dear Quote Investigator: Many, many years ago I saw an old clip on TV of George S. Kaufman and he was replying to a question submitted by a listener/viewer/audience member. For the sake of example let’s say it was a woman complaining about her husband’s smoking …
Continue reading “Combining the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Telescopes Still Won’t Be Enough”
Samuel Goldwyn? Roger Miller? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: I noticed that the Wikiquote website lists one of my favorite funny sayings attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, the famous film producer [WSG]. In the version of the story I heard, a friend told Goldwyn that he wanted to honor the studio head by naming his son after …
Albert Einstein? Leo Mattersdorf? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: I have been struggling trying to figure out how much I owe to the Internal Revenue Service this year. The quote I would like you to explore does not sound very extraordinary. What makes it funny and outrageous is the identity of the person who supposedly …
Continue reading “Quote Origin: The Hardest Thing in the World to Understand Is Income Taxes”
Vladimir Lenin? Winston Churchill? George Riddell? H. L. Mencken? Fictional? Dear Quote Investigator: I was thumbing through The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations to try and find a good saying about freedom of the press and I was stunned to see this hostile sentence [OPQ]: As to freedom of the press, why should any man …