Tracing Quotations
Willie Sutton? Paul Perritt? Robert M. Yoder? Fred Curran? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: The famous criminal Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks, and his reported response was simple, eloquent, and humorous: Because that’s where the money is. Now, I have been told that Sutton never really said this. Instead, it was …
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Hillary Clinton? Eleanor Roosevelt? Rita Mae Brown? Phyllis Schlafly? Lowell Bruce Laingen? Armand J. Gariepy? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: I read in the New York Times that one of the favorite adages of Hillary Clinton, former Senator and Secretary of State, is the following statement attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: Women are like tea bags. …
James Dean? John Derek? Willard Motley? Irene L. Luce? J. M. O’Connor? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: James Dean was a charismatic young movie star and an icon of rebellion when he died in a car crash. I have always connected him to this motto: Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. But …
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Dwight D. Eisenhower? Gerald Ford? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: President Dwight D. Eisenhower is commonly credited with making a comical statement that is almost a tautology. Here are a few different versions of his supposed remark: Things are more like they are right now than they ever have been.Things are more like they are …
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Ernest Hemingway? William R. Kane? Roy K. Moulton? Avery Hopwood? Arthur C. Clarke? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Most people are familiar with short stories, but there is another class of works that might be called short-short stories. “Flash fiction” and “sudden fiction” are labels that are applied to this style of literature. One of …
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Stephen Wright? Ernst Berg? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: I am trying to discover where the following maxim comes from: The second mouse gets the cheese. Sometimes this phrase appears as part of a longer saying: The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Your help would be greatly appreciated. …
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Amish Saying? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Native American Proverb? Wendell Berry? Oscar Wilde? Chief Seattle? Moses Henry Cass? Dennis J. Hall? Helen Caldicott? Lester Brown? David R. Brower? Taghi Farvar? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: In my opinion the most thoughtful and poignant quotation about the environment is the following: We do not inherit the earth …
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: I have been trying to trace a popular saying about journalism which can be expressed in several ways. Here are four examples to …
Mark Twain? Oscar Wilde? Josh Billings? Spanish Proverb? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Everyone is guilty of some procrastination. Even the industrious humorist Mark Twain was credited with a quotation sympathetic to the indolent: Never put off till tomorrow, what you can do the day after tomorrow. Puzzlingly, this same quip has been ascribed to …
King George II? Duke of Newcastle? Joe Miller? James Wolfe? Question for Quote Investigator: When George II of Great Britain was planning to send General James Wolfe on a military expedition to Canada his close advisor told him that Wolfe was a poor selection for such an important assignment because he was a madman. The …
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