Quotes Uncovered
Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently.
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Casey Frank asked:
[Who said] “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”?
The Yale Book of Quotations has the following two quotes:
“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” Attributed to George Bernard Shaw in Reader’s Digest, November 1942.
“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (1887).
Grant asked:
I’ve been trying to find a source for the following: “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” It’s often attributed to Goethe or Hugo.
The Yale Book of Quotations, which attempts to trace all famous quotations to their earliest findable sources, has this:
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Daniel Burnham, quoted in Collier’s, July 6, 1912.
Burnham was a prominent architect.
JJG asked:
There’s an advice triad, where the third line gets altered to fit the circumstance, but the first two are:
“Never play cards with a man called Doc,
Never eat at a place called Mom’s,
and never …”Do you know the origin?
Yes, I do. The YBQ cites it thusly:
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.” Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side (1956).
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
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How about the first use of the now cliché “If ________, then the terrorists have already won.”
There’s a quote I once saw attributed to Abe Lincoln, if a refrigerator magnet is to be believed. It said “I’d rather be thought a fool and say nothing, than to speak up, and remove all doubt.” Any clue if (and if so, where) he said it?
Who said, “Don’t borrow money in a poker game.”
Please advise on the provenance of “Man is the only animal that looks at the stars, knows that he will die, and laughs.”
Dan
“May you live in an interesting time.” Been told it’s a Chinese curse or attributed to some part of Turandot. Any other insights?
I’m curious about “two’s company, three’s a crowd”. I always thought it referred to the preferred number of companions. But in his 1989 book, One Up On Wall Street, Peter Lynch wrote:
“…words of wisdom that came either from Aeschylus the playwright, Goethe the author, or Alf, the TV star from outer space: Two’s a company, three’s a crowd…”
I’m pretty sure none of his attributions are correct, but I also noticed that he added a word, “a”, prompting me to wonder what the original source and meaning of this bromide was.
How do you answer these quotations? For example, the second example of this post, the asked quotation is pretty significantly different from the answered one. How did you find them? Surely even your might book does not have an index THAT good. Did you find the connection by memory? Through vigorously searching your database? How? I don’t know how it would be possible to find the connection, unless you had one or the other memorized already when you saw its counterpart.
And as someone currently living abroad, without access to your volume, surely the first two answered quotes aren’t listed together. That must surely have been a result of connections that exist only in your mighty memory. I’m really curious about your methodology for creating these blog posts.
The Time-CNN website has an article dated Jan. 28, 2009 from 24/7 Wall St. that begins as follows:
Mark Twain and Will Rogers shared a sentiment. As Twain said, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore”.
The November 2009 issue of Scientific American has an article about vertical farms that says:
To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”
However, Ralph Keyes in “The Quote Verifier” says that neither Rogers nor Twain created the saying. Was it crafted by a real estate salesperson? Has anyone made progress tracing it?