Caroline Thomas Harnsberger – Quote Investigator®

Quote Origin: There Is No Such Thing as a New Idea. We Simply Take a Lot of Old Ideas and Put Them Into a Sort of Mental Kaleidoscope

Mark Twain? Albert Bigelow Paine? Caroline Thomas Harnsberger? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: A famous author once suggested that humankind was not generating any genuinely new ideas. The author illustrated this viewpoint via a clever simile. Ideas were like pieces of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. The ideas which appeared to be new were only configurations …

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Quote Origin: We Learn From History That We Do Not Learn From History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel? Aldous Huxley? George Bernard Shaw? Henry Tizard? Caroline Thomas Harnsberger? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: The historical record displays clear patterns, yet there is enormous resistance to learning from these patterns. Here are two versions of a humorously contradictory adage: (1) We learn from history that we do not learn from …

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The Trouble Ain’t That There Is Too Many Fools, But That the Lightning Ain’t Distributed Right

Mark Twain? Merle Johnson? Caroline Thomas Harnsberger? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Mark Twain once spoke about the number of fools in the world. He did not believe that there were too many fools, but he did suggest that lightning strikes were not ideally distributed. Would you please help me to find a citation for this …

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