Frazz by Jef Mallett for August 22, 2023

“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”― Abraham Lincoln

You don’t need to know things. Make them up with confidence: there will always be enough people who want to believe and pay good money to spread the hogwash themselves.

Whatever the line is, it should be easy to figure out which of those three might have said it.

“I didn’t say half the stuff they said I did.” Albert Einstein

O say anything… people will either forget or remember.

To answer her question, a quote sounds more impressive when it came from a famous person known for their quotes.

It sounds like a good idea?

That’s an easy one, Caulfield: T-shirt and poster makers have to sell their products.

“The more I know about humanity the more I like my dog”. – widely attributed quote

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

my favorite quote: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else” Winston Churchill

If you’re trying to remember who said something, you’ll have about a 30% chance of being right if you say it was either Mark Twain or Dorothy Parker.

What’s he talking about?

I’ve recently been pondering this myself. I’m going to start attributing them to some obscure person I meet on the bus. Or at least ‘You know, THEY say…’

Wanna guess which ‘coinage’ they are discussing?

If Teddy Roosevelt said “Comparison is the thief of joy” in a letter to a friend, would that be for PhDs in literature or history to know? It is not like Teddy Roosevelt is known as an author.

SO many of those out there these days. Don’t believe any attribution you don’t know yourself for sure without checking out the reference.

Who was it who said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble so much as what you know that just ain’t so”?

Fred in the Hanes Company teaches literature in his spare time.

“Of course I lost the election. Isn’t it obvious?” — Donald J. Trump, The Nation, Aug 25, 2023, p. 4. Now, if only THAT would go viral.

My favorite quote: “Out side of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read”

“Interesting quotes should always be attributed to somebody important.” – Cicero

Because it’s plausible enough that we can be reasonably sure most people won’t check. ;-)

Could be worse. One of these days I want to make a T-shirt that says “Che Guevara would put a bullet in your head for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt”.

Jesse Jackson (allegedly) – “you start off saying ‘as someone was said …’, after many repetitions, you can eventually say ‘as I’ve often said’”.

“Mark Twain never said that” Hard to prove a negative.

Once in a while, someone appears to be known only for a single quotation. Finding anything else about them is hard.

“Harry, use the Force.” Gandalf

C’mon, we all know that, if it was a great line, it was from George Carlin!

I once wrote that we should be careful what to believe when something is taken out of context, but then I got a reply noting that I myself admitted that what I had written was literally “taken out of context”.

Having a famous person say something increases the perceived credibility – especially if it was said a long time ago. According to Quote Investigator, none of those people said that comparison is a thief of joy. There were many “thief of joy” quotes from that era. None were from famous authors and none were about comparison. 2003 was the first published variant of the familiar saying.

>

“And now I need a bath.”

-Albert Einstein

(Get Fuzzy July 26, 2007)

The problem with Twain is that he was a prolific on the lecture circuits and regular banquet speaker. Many of the quotes attributed to him were verbal ones written down by others, and not found in his books. Of course, even when he was alive, people were attributing their own witticisms to him, particularly if they weren’t fit for polite company. He was notorious for his crude jokes.