Memes abound in social media: capsules of hard-hitting maxims or side-splitting jokes. Political, spiritual or merely motivational, memes traffic in quotes from writers, leaders and taste makers distilling the high-hanging fruit of great mental strivings or hard-earned wisdom.
What’s worthy of attention are those nuggets of truth whose origins are suspect at best, or they simply remain orphaned from any particular thought leader. Having compiled a shortlist of what I believe are such exceptional sayings, they share the common themes of truth and the social bonds required to discern and maintain it.
In no particular order, I submit the following Five Greatest Misattributed Quotes:
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
— Mark Twain
If ever a quote existed as the emblem of our times, this would qualify as a peerless entry. The advent of Donald Trump as presidential candidate and one-term president has fomented a mouth-foaming following as rabid as any cult of recent memory.
Donald Trump has told a few lies… a number of whoppers and some tall tales that his sycophants have lapped up. The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has doggedly followed Trump supporters around the country in an interview series called Fingering of the Pulse; to confront them with evidence of their dear leader’s chicanery. They resist truth with the courage and fortitude of patriotic spies refusing to betray their homeland upon the pain of death.
In a self-referential stroke of irony, it turns out that Mark Twain hadn’t coined the aforementioned maxim. According to quote sleuths at Quote Investigator, the saying had possibly one antecedent, a phrase by a Spanish writer in 1647, named Baltasar Gracian: “…every one who is all too firmly persuaded is a blockhead, and the more erroneous his judgement the greater is his tenacity with which he holds it.”
The Quote Investigator culled a few other like-minded quotes from Mark Twain’s speaking and writing career, but none that would confirm him as the author of this quotation.
That this particular phrase took root in the soil of American public life illustrates the unscientific minds of rank and file citizens.
has argued, quite convincingly I think, that people hold on to deceptions out of a desire to fit in with a group that espouses the same erroneous views. As groupthink typically characterizes small, close-knit groups, it is harrowing to imagine Donald Trump’s following, which numbers in the tens of millions, marching in lockstep with one another.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.”
— Albert Einstein
Is it hard-nosed determination or just simple insanity? A quote popularly attributed to the German physicist, it turns out, could not be verified. Quote Investigator’s efforts found a mention of insanity in a Knoxville newspaper in 1981.
Reporting on a conversation that took place at an Al-Anon meeting, the paper paraphrased an attendee who begged to differ with Step Number Two: “…to believe in a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Not all co-dependents are willing to admit the need to be restored to sanity, the participant pointed out. Another attendee then responded with, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
In the same year, the quote appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. There are a number of “near misses” in earlier publications like 1955’s Psychology of Personal Constructs, which states, “we may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation.” Obviously, it’s not as brief and punchy as the maxim misattributed to Einstein. Perhaps there are other efforts that surpass repetition in the race toward insanity. But it’s a perfect fit for the malady of addiction.
“We may have democracy and we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
— Justice Louis Brandeis
Here’s yet another maxim made for our times. It re-entered the arena of public discourse in 2000 during Ralph Nader’s Green Party presidential nomination acceptance speech.
Credit for the original attribution goes to a friend of Justice Brandeis, Edward Keating. Keating represented Colorado in Congress from 1913 to 1919 and remained in Washington, D.C. afterward to edit the railway union newspaper, Labor. On several occasions in print, Keating shared the quote, however, never mentioned the time or instance when said quote was uttered by Justice Brandeis. Brandeis scholars have been at a loss locating documentary evidence for said quote.
A review of a Louis Brandeis biography summarized the Supreme Court justice’s life, that was defined by “His struggles against government corruption and financial concentration, which made him famous before he went on the bench…. his faith in a free, informed public [which] remains a beacon of democracy.” It stands to reason, given Brandeis’s career, why he would be attributed for the statement about the antagonistic relationship between concentrated wealth and democracy. It is only the how that has eluded the confirmation of scholars. Could it be possible that Edward Keating, himself, coined the phrase and knew it would attract a broader audience coming from a Supreme Court justice?
Not entirely unrelated, “Every billionaire is a policy failure” is what I would consider an intellectual descendant of the quote attributed to Louis Brandeis.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its trousers on.”
— Winston Churchill
Keep in mind an early version of this quote entered public discourse some considerable time before the telegraph and the locomotive had arrived to accelerate the pace of communication. It was a far-sighted view of the human condition and its propensity to receiving and trafficking lies. It’s also another unattributed quote that became attached to Mark Twain’s genius at one point.
Since truth is typically the first casualty of war, giving Winston Churchill credit fits like a hand in glove. As England’s war-time head of state, it positioned Churchill with a view of falsehood’s rampant deployment by enemy states as well as allied ones. Despite the ideal pairing of quote and leader, there exists no record of the prime minister actually writing or saying it.
An early appearance of the quote’s exact wording is found in a sermon given by English evangelist Charles Spurgeon in 1855. The theologian only frames the source as an old proverb without identifying its exact source.
“He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
There are few maxims that capture the tension of unlikely allies in politics. As the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows. Because there is always an occasion to pause and wonder about an askew political alliance that on the surface appears contrary to reason.
Early versions of this quote exchange the pejorative term for “rascal,” but the saying’s underlying partisanship has always come through.
In 1948, Time printed a story that mentioned an anecdote having been circulating in the nation’s capitol since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. It concerned a preparatory memo sent to the president in advance of a visit from Nicaragua’s president, Anastasio Somoza in 1945. After having read through the memo, the article quoted Roosevelt remarking, “As a Nicaraguan [citizen] might say, he’s a son-of-a-bitch but he he’s ours.”
Given the gunboat diplomacy practiced by the United States, the source of the quote could have been interchangeable among any American president. And the quote’s subject — any Latin American dictator in the employ of American foreign policy — could have been as well.
As much as the exploration of misattributed quotes fascinates me, I wondered if each quote discussed here would have received the same attention if identified with ‘lesser,’ unknown thought leaders. Toward that end, this occasion strikes me as an opportunity to put that query to the test.
The following is a maxim I coined a number of years ago and never had the chance to share it. What prompted it was an encounter I had with an American, home-grown religion whose taxonomy of prohibitions and transgressions impressed me as unnaturally idealistic. I am confident the expression applies to a variety of other rigidly regulated organizations.
“High ideals project long shadows.”
— Jude Folly
As an enthusiast for Jungian psychology and discourses about the human shadow (those qualities one rejects about the self), I learned about the psychic dynamics that shape human personality and behavior.
What was the relationship between ideals developed by human efforts and how said ideals play out through human behavior? As I thought about the religion I mentioned, I could not help but consider the towering ideals its practitioners projected, not just in moral conduct, the ideals also infused the architecture of their houses of worship and the traditional roles their family units reinforced. Families presented a preternaturally happy, obedient and conservative image to an outsider like myself.
To the Disney Corporation, as an organization, I believe this maxim would apply quite fittingly. It upholds a wholesome, family-friendly, all-American facade, but behind the enchanted curtain, it’s just as cut-throat and competitive a business as any other. The stunning irony: as a merchant of folk tale narratives developed into elaborate, high concept multi-media productions, it has not absorbed any of the shadow-balancing wisdom of said fairy tales.
It would be a mistake to read this critique as a broadside against cultivating ideals. Ideals are crucial to the human experience and aspirations, however, shadow forces will make their presence known, whether or not we consciously acknowledge them.
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Previously Published on Medium
Photo by Alexandra on Unsplash
