Quotes: Usually, Not Really Part 2

What generally happens is that the came of Telephone that used to be the route for quotations, tended to shorten and polish them.

* Voltaire almost certainly never exactly said “I disapprove of what you say, but i will defend to the death your right to say it.” Still, it is a favorite of a vanishing breed: newspaper editorial pages.

* Mark Twain almost certainly never said, “If you don’t like New England weather, wait a minute.”

* During the years when I regularly walked the Harvard Bridge between Boston and MIT, I loved the quotation, attributed to an Arctic explorer that “the coldest I have ever been is on the Harvard Bridge in February.” If anyone actually ever said that, the Internet doesn’t know about it.

* For most of my life I have been attributing “People who talk of the dignity of labor have never done any” to AFL-CIO leader George Meany. I still contend he said it, even though the Internet disagrees. Turns out it is from G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman. I suggest the version I recall is pithier than the actual exchange.

Poet Octavius Robinson: “I believe in the dignity of labor.”

Chauffeur Enery Straker: “That's because you've never done any, Mr. Robinson.”