Tracing Quotations
Theodore Roosevelt? Albert Einstein? Benjamin Franklin? Samuel Smiles? Josh Billings? Mr. Phelps? G. K. Chesterton? Robert Smith Surtees? Joseph Conrad? Will Rogers? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Mistakes are unavoidable in the life of an active and vital person. Several adages highlight this important theme: 1) A man who never makes a mistake will never make …
Continue reading “The Person Who Never Makes a Mistake Will Never Make Anything”
Plato? Theodore Hesburgh? Creed C. Black? William J. Brennan Jr.? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: The following questioning and unhappy words have been attributed to the ancient Greek sage Plato: What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with …
Continue reading “They Riot in the Streets Inflamed with Wild Notions; Their Morals Are Decaying”
Barbara W. Tuchman? Denys Arthur Winstanley? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: The popular historian Barbara W. Tuchman suggested that it was unfair to “judge men of the past by the ideas of the present”. She credited this interesting stance to an unnamed English historian. Yet, I have been unable to determine the identity of this astute …
Milton Friedman? William F. Buckley Jr.? French Sage? Alfred E. Kahn? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: The well-known economist Milton Friedman was often critical of governmental power. The following saying has been attributed to him: If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand. …
Leonard Bernstein? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of societal upheaval and uncertainty in the United States. The prominent conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein who was well-known for crafting the music of “West Side Story” delivered a speech during which he asserted that only the artists of the …
Humorist: Red Skelton? George Jessel? Goodman Ace? Groucho Marx? Bert Lahr? James Bacon? Funeral: Harry Cohn? Louis B. Mayer? Dear Quote Investigator: A show business platitude states that success at the box office is achievable by simply giving the people what they want. A harsh comical anecdote about a funeral reinterpreted this saying. The memorial …
Continue reading “Give the People What They Want and They’ll Come”
Harold L. Spence? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: You examined an adage about success and work that cleverly referred to their alphabetical order. I’ve seen a different joke about duty and pleasure: Duty comes before pleasure, but only in the dictionary. Would you please explore this saying? Quote Investigator: The earliest instance of this type of …
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George Bernard Shaw? John Harris? Brigid Brophy? Apocryphal? Dear Quote investigator: George Bernard Shaw was a strong advocate of vegetarianism who was greatly concerned with animal welfare. The following statement attributed to Shaw encouraged the reader to embrace an abstract extraplanetary perspective and asked the reader to condemn the instrumental use of animals for food, …
Continue reading “Animal Rights and Beings from Another Planet”
Ralph Waldo Emerson? Leo Rosten? Thomas Carlyle? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: On Facebook and the web the following quotation has been circulating widely: The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived …
Continue reading “The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter”
Grace Murray Hopper? Apocryphal? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist whose work was central to the development of COBOL, one of the foundational high-level programming languages. She worked in a very fast moving technological domain where simply attempting to repeat previously successful strategies was sometimes disastrous. I am trying …
Continue reading “Most Dangerous Phrase: We’ve Always Done It That Way”