Voltaire? Mark Twain? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? John Bright? Apocryphal? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Legal conflicts are extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming for all the participants. Even the winner of a lawsuit can suffer financially. The ill-fated contender in two legal entanglements once said something like the following. Here are two versions. The word “gained” is …
Tag Archives: Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Quote Origin: Easy Reading Is Hard Writing
Maya Angelou? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Thomas Hood? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Charles Allston Collins? Anthony Trollope? Lord Byron? William Makepeace Thackeray? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Writers should strive to create texts that are informative, interesting, stimulating, and readable. But one of my favorite sayings reveals that this can be a remarkably difficult task: Easy reading is …
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Quote Origin: Easy Writing’s Vile Hard Reading
Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Lord Byron? Ernest Hemingway? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: There are two complementary and intertwined statements about reading and writing that I would like you to investigate: 1) Easy writing results in hard reading. 2) Easy reading requires hard writing. Many different phrases have been used to express these two thoughts, and …
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Quote Origin: Your Manuscript Is Good and Original, But What is Original Is Not Good; What Is Good Is Not Original
Samuel Johnson? Martin Sherlock? Johann Heinrich Voss? Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Daniel Webster? Samuel Wilberforce Question for Quote Investigator: The great lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson is credited with a famously devastating remark about a book he was evaluating: Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not …
Quote Origin: The Only Unnatural Sex Act Is That Which One Cannot Perform
Alfred Kinsey? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Xaviera Hollander? William Burroughs? Sigmund Freud? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Years ago I read a statement credited to the researcher Alfred Kinsey who was famous for producing the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior. I do not remember the exact phrasing but the expression was similar to this: The only …
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