Quote Investigator® – Page 125

Quote Origin: It Is Not Real Work Unless You Would Rather Be Doing Something Else

James Matthew Barrie? Chub De Wolfe? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: When I am absorbed in performing a difficult and fascinating task I do not feel like I am working. James Matthew Barrie, the well-known creator of “Peter Pan”, addressed this phenomenon:

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

I have been unable to find a solid citation. Would you please help?

Reply from Quote Investigator: This saying is difficult to trace because the original phrasing employed by J. M. Barrie was different. On May 3, 1922 Barrie delivered the Rectorial Address at St. Andrews University. He spoke about his time as a freelance journalist, and noted that his excitement and motivation were large enough that the experience did not seem like work. In the following passage he also referred to Robert Louis Stevenson’s success as a writer. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

But now, on reflection, a dreadful sinking assails me, that this was not really work. The artistic callings—you remember how Stevenson thumped them—are merely doing what you are clamorous to be at; it is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: You Better Not Compromise Yourself. It’s All You Got

Janis Joplin? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Janis Joplin was an American rock star of the late 1960s and early 1970s who tragically died when she was only 27. Her vocalizations and emotional delivery were distinctive. Apparently she said:

Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.

Would you please help me to find a citation?

Reply from Quote Investigator: The earliest evidence located by QI appeared in the Sunday newspaper supplement “Parade” magazine which published a short profile of Janis Joplin in April 1969:¹

Last year, Janis earned over $50,000. Her album, Cheap Thrills, was a big hit. Now, with a new band, a comfortable apartment in San Francisco and a multicolored Porsche, Janis is big-time and rising.

Her message: “You better not compromise yourself. It’s all you got.”

The quotation above differed slightly from the popular modern version. The text was not part of an interview; hence, it was possible that the journalist Derek Norcross lifted the quotation from some earlier article that QI has not yet seen.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: I Don’t Get Ulcers. I Give Them

Harry Cohn? Samuel Goldwyn? David O. Selznick? Jimmie Fidler? Lyndon B. Johnson? Anonymous?

Question for Quote Investigator: According to a Hollywood legend a movie mogul expressed his unhappiness by angrily upbraiding underlings. Eventually, an assistant cautioned him that delivering repeated harangues can cause stomach ulcers. The magnate snarled:

I don’t get ulcers. I give them.

This remark has been attributed to several people including:

Harry Cohn who was president of Columbia Pictures Corporation which made films such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “All the King’s Men”.
Samuel Goldwyn who worked at Paramount and Samuel Goldwyn Productions while making films such as “Wuthering Heights” and “The Best Years of Our Lives”.
David O. Selznick who worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and RKO while producing films such as “King Kong” and “Gone With the Wind”.

Would you please explore this topic?

Reply from Quote Investigator: The earliest match located by QI appeared in the syndicated gossip column of Jimmie Fidler in March 1947. The line was delivered by a Hollywood producer who was not named but was described as famous and egotistical. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

Seems one of his employes, after listening to the big shot administer a fifteen-minute tongue-lashing to an assistant, ventured one solicitous remark. “You shouldn’t let yourself become so excited,” he warned. “You’re liable to get stomach ulcers.” “I don’t get ulcers,” roared the mighty one, “I give them!”

Fidler retold the tale in June 1949, and he belatedly identified the producer as David O. Selznick.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: Recipe To Create a Publisher: Take an Idiot Man from a Lunatic Asylum . . .

Mark Twain? Frank Nelson Doubleday? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Mark Twain apparently held a very low opinion of book publishers. He suggested that publishers could be created via a multigenerational combination of individuals from lunatic asylums. Could you please help me find a citation for this sentiment?

Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1897 Frank Nelson Doubleday and Samuel McClure cofounded the publishing company Doubleday & McClure. The new firm required a stable of successful authors; hence, Doubleday traveled to Europe to attempt to recruit luminaries such as Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. He visited Twain in a hotel in Vienna, Austria, and Twain delivered the following comical barb. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

He told me, among other things, that he had a perfect recipe for making a modern American publisher. “Take an idiot man from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman, and the fourth generation of this connection should be a good publisher from the American point of view. I had a perfect publisher myself, as you know,” he said. “His name was Frank Bliss, and thank God, he is dead and gone to hell.”

In 1928 Frank Doubleday privately printed “A Few Indiscreet Recollections” and the text above was included. The slim volume was limited to fifty-seven copies, and the recipients were described with the phrase “Indulgent Relatives”.

Doubleday died in 1934. Many years later, in 1972 the privately printed material was released under the title “The Memoirs of a Publisher”. The 1972 edition included a footnote slyly pointing out that Twain’s lacerating description would ultimately apply to himself:²

* Clemens himself later became a publisher.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty

William F. Buckley Jr.? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: I am trying to verify a quotation from the conservative commentator and novelist William F. Buckley Jr. It goes something like this:

I would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from an Ivy League University.

I do not recall if the phone book was for a particular city, and I do not know whether a specific university was named. Could you please help me to find a citation?

Reply from Quote Investigator: William F. Buckley attended Yale University as an undergraduate, and he wrote critically about the institution in his book “God and Man at Yale”; however, a different school of higher learning appeared in his saying about governance. The earliest instance located by QI appeared in a profile and interview of Buckley in “Esquire” magazine in January 1961:¹

“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory,” he said, “than by the Harvard University faculty.”

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: I Can Hire Half the Working Class To Fight the Other Half

Jay Gould? John Livingston? Delmore Schwartz? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: In the 19th-century a class of powerful industrialists were accused of unethical business practices, and the critical epithet “robber baron” appeared in journals and newspapers. The following incendiary remark has been attributed to the wealthy railroad magnate Jay Gould:

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

Would you please explore the provenance of this expression?

Reply from Quote Investigator: The earliest pertinent citation located by QI appeared in a letter from an agrarian organizer that was published in October 1891 in a Topeka, Kansas newspaper. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

The truth of Jay Gould’s assertion that he “could buy the vote of a farmer member of the legislature for the price of a bull calf, about seven dollars and a half,” was clearly disproved at Topeka last January, where not a single People’s party member of the Kansas House could be bought at any price.

It is my prayer to God that all farmers and other toilers will now unite in one solid phalanx, so that the other characteristic remark of the same gentleman, that he “could hire one-half the farmers to shoot the other half to death,” shall also show him to have overestimated the power of his money, supplemented though it may be by Satanic cunning,

John Livingston,
President New York State Farmers’ Alliance.
Campville, Tioga Co., N.Y., Oct 21, 1891.

Gould died shortly afterward in 1892. This early instance of the quotation referred to “farmers” instead of the “working class”. The modern version evolved over time.

Livingston employed the phrase “characteristic remark” which signaled he had not heard the remark directly. Also, Livingston was clearly a forceful political adversary of Gould.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: In the Marriage Union the Independence of the Husband and Wife Will Be Equal, Their Dependence Mutual, and Their Obligations Reciprocal

Lucretia Mott? Louis K. Anspacher? Anonymous?

Question for Quote Investigator: Historically, the marriage contract has been unequal. A different vision was presented by reformers in the nineteenth century:

In the true marriage relation the independence of the husband and the wife is equal, their independence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

Would you please explore the provenance of this expression?

Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1841 the prominent women’s rights activist Lucretia Mott delivered a speech in Boston, Massachusetts during which she spoke about the changes she wished to see in the relations between men and women. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

I believe the tendency of truth, on this subject, is to equalize the sexes; and that, when truth directs us, there will be no longer assumed authority on one side, or admitted inferiority on the other; but that as we advance in the cultivation of all our powers, physical as well as intellectual and moral, we shall see that our independence is equal, our dependence mutual, and our obligations reciprocal.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: A Specialist Knows More and More About Less and Less

William J. Mayo? Nicholas Murray Butler? William Warde Fowler? Patrick Geddes? Mabel M. Barker? Y. Srinivasa Rao? Arthur Bugs Baer? Robert E. Swain? Distinguished Scottish person?

Question for Quote Investigator: The modern explosion of knowledge has led to an age of specialization with this concomitant quip:

A specialist knows more and more about less and less.

A more elaborate version includes a funny addendum:

An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.

A related joke cleverly twists this saying:

A generalist knows less and less about more and more until he or she knows nothing about everything.

Would you please explore the history of these statements?

Reply from Quote Investigator: These complex expressions evolved over time from simpler fragments. In 1911 the “Review of Theology & Philosophy” based in Edinburgh, Scotland published an article by William Warde Fowler who was a scholar at the University of Oxford. Fowler used a phrase from the first expression while reviewing a book that was focused on an overly narrow topic:¹

“We are getting to know more and more about less and less.” This dictum, reported to me as that of a distinguished Scotchman, aptly expresses the character of this little work. A young German scholar has been able to fill more than a hundred pages with matter relating to what seems to be the survival, in the religious systems of Greece and Italy, of a single practice belonging to a primitive magico-religious age.

In 1915 a periodical from the University of Liverpool called “The Town Planning Review” printed an article by Professor Patrick Abercrombie who credited Patrick Geddes with a precursor. Geddes was a prominent sociologist and influential town planner:²

Professor Geddes has somewhere said that the modern aim is to learn more and more about less and less. . .

In 1916 an article in “The Museums Journal: The Organ of the Museums Association” by Mabel M. Barker also ascribed a precursor to Geddes:³

. . . the deadly peril of over-specialism against which Professor Geddes warns us, the peril of “knowing more and more about less and less”. . .

In 1922 an article by Y. Srinivasa Rao in “The Herald of the Star” based in London included a strong match for the first statement above with an ascription to an unnamed professor:⁴

Thus there is specialisation not only in the study and practice of medicine, but also in the sale of drugs. A professor once defined specialisation as knowing more and more about less and less.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: Be the Change You Wish To See in the World

Mohandas Gandhi? Arleen Lorrance? Ernest Troutner? Diane Kennedy Pike? Anonymous?

Question for Quote Investigator: Often you cannot convince someone via speech alone to constructively alter a behavior, but you can provide a model for emulation by changing your own behavior. Here are three versions of this notion:

Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Be the change you want to see happen.
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

This saying has been attributed to the famous Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. Yet, I have been unable to find a solid citation. Would you please help?

Reply from Quote Investigator: Gandhi died in 1948, and the earliest close match known to QI appeared many years later in 1974 within a book chapter written by educator Arleen Lorrance. She described her unhappiness while employed at a high school in Brooklyn, New York:¹

For seven years I served my sentence and marked off institutional time; I complained, cried, accepted hopelessness, put down the rest of the faculty for all the things they didn’t do, and devoted all my energies to trying to change others and the system.

Lorrance’s approach changed radically when she achieved a crucial insight about the most effective way to achieve change:

It came in on me loud and clear that I was the only one who could imprison (or release) me, that I was the only one I could do anything about changing. So I let go of my anger and negativism and made a decision to simply be totally loving, open and vulnerable all the time.

Her book chapter was titled “The Love Project”, and Lorrance was the initiator and facilitator of the project. The saying under examination was a core principle. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:

One way to start a preventative program is to be the change you want to see happen. That is the essence and substance of the simple and successful endeavor known as THE LOVE PROJECT.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Quote Origin: A Lottery Is a Taxation Upon All the Fools in Creation

William Petty? Henry Fielding? Adam Smith? Camillo Benso? James Wolcott? Marshall McLuhan? Roger Jones? Anonymous?

Question for Quote Investigator: The winners of a recent lottery jackpot split more than one billion dollars. Yet the probability of a lucky lottery strike is smaller than an unlucky lightning strike. Economists, mathematicians, and wits have made sardonic remarks like the following:

A lottery is tax on stupidity.
The lottery is a tax on fools.
Lotteries are a tax on the mathematically challenged.

Who you please explore this topic?

Reply from Quote Investigator: Finding the earliest instances of this sentiment is difficult because expressions are variable. QI has located an example in the 1662 document “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions” by the prominent English economist Sir William Petty. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:¹

Now in the way of Lottery men do also tax themselves in the general, though out of hopes of Advantage in particular: A Lottery therefore is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools; men that have good opinion of their own luckiness, or that have believed some Fortune-teller or Astrologer, who had promised them great success about the time and place of the Lottery, lying Southwest perhaps from the place where the destiny was read.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.