Source Your Damn Quotes
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” said Napoleon. Or Robert Heinlein. Or Ayn Rand, or David Hume, or Goethe, or… or any number of figures who also didn’t say it.
(According to Quote Investigator, the actual originator of this quote was a computer programmer called Robert Hanlon.)
There are a lot of spurious quotations online.
If you see a quote online, it’s probably formatted like this:
“Quote” — Name
This is frankly atrocious. There is no source. These quotes give me a name, but no book, article, speech — nothing to go to. If there is no source, why should I believe the person said it at all.
Of course, the problem with this slip-shod reference style is not that people will become skeptical. People are all too credulous towards these source-less quotes.
Why am I making a fuss about this?
Misattributing a quote is not the end of the world. Neither your life nor anyone else’s will be negatively affected by thinking Laozi or Mark Twain said such-and-such. Yes, everyone cares about the truth, but we all know there’s costs and benefits to finding the truth. In my garden, there is a specific number of blades of grass. The cost of counting the true number of blades has no benefit.
If this were twenty or more years ago, the same would go for sourcing quotations. The cost of checking if a quote were genuine would just be too high. Once upon a time, you would see a dubious quote, attributed simply to “Mark Twain”. What are you going to do? Will you look through the thousands of pages Mark Twain wrote, looking for a single sentence, a sentence you suspect doesn’t even exist?
Luckily, we now have the internet. The benefit of correctly identifying a quotation’s source is as low as ever. Now, however, the cost has plummeted. You can source a quotation in under five minutes.
Sometimes you need only copy-paste the quotation into Google. After scrolling through the websites that only provide the quote (sans source), you might find one that provides a source.
If that fails, there are many reliable websites to help you. First of all, there’s Wikiquote. Like Wikipedia, Wikiquote requires citations. Just go to the page of the figure who supposedly said the quote, and hopefully you’ll find it with a source attached. (Some figures even have a section dedicated to “misattributed” quotes.)
Another indispensable source is Quote Investigator. This blog sources user-submitted quotations. The author does not just give a true or false to whether the quote was said by such-and-such. The author will trace the quotation as far back in time as he can, finding the original source and author.
Let’s say, however, that at the end of all this work, you discover that your favourite quotation was not said by Twain, or Lincoln, or Einstein. Let’s say you discover it was actually said by an accountant in 1943. What to do?
If it was a good quotation to begin with, this shouldn’t matter. Wisdom is wisdom, regardless of whether a president or an accountant said it. Just repeat this quote with the genuine originator.
But what if the quote loses its shine when it loses its famous “originator”. Now that you know Mark Twain never said it, it suddenly seems awkward and trite. Well, if the quote needs a famous originator to be profound, maybe the quote was never profound to begin with.
