Quote: Teach Your Children Well
While we teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.
--Angela Schwind
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Quote: Question Headlines
The answer to all question headlines is no.
-- Ian Betteridge…
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Quote: Choice
“Every choice you make makes you.”
--John C. Maxwell
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.”
Virtually every quotation you know is either misattributed or inaccurate. Neither particularly matters. They last as quotes because they resonate with truth. Getting them exactly right or precisely attributed doesn’t make them any worse at expressing truths or humor.
For example, my freshman advisor told me:
“If you don’t stop spending so much time at the newspaper and the radio station you will have a mediocre academic career, taking the path of least resistance, just slipping by everything.”
Years later, when I started telling the anecdote, I quoted him as warning me that I was in “the twilight of a mediocre academic career”. It was only recently, when I discovered my freshman journal, that I realized I was misquoting him. I still tell the anecdote that way, because it is better. It appears in my 50th reunion book from MIT.
Misattributed quotes used to stay alive on the fact that that you generally can’t prove the negative. The Internet makes available nearly every word written by a great person, so at the very least you can say, “There is no record of them saying or writing that.”
To be continued
Setting Headlines
Thank You Reid Ashe. He knew the name of the device we used to set headlines at The Tech: VGC Photo Typositor.
Probably not the model shown, but similar. Ironically, the article is not about the device, but about the font used for the word Typositor on its frame.
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Passwords
Tom Rush’s Quote of the Month: “Someone cracked my password. Now I need to rename my puppy.”
–Unknown
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Dinosaur Blog
In a recent comic strip, the daughter sees the father reading a newspaper and says, “When are you going to be through reading your Dinosaur Blog?”
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Paul on the Top5
Little Known Features of Tesla’s Cybertruck. I snagged number 3 on a Top5 list.
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Paul Under The Knife
Not my hip. Not yet. Pacemaker battery replacement (they call it a generator replacement). A few days in the hospital, a useless left arm for three weeks. Low-risk surgery, worked fine.
“Not everything worthwhile can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is worthwhile.” Or, to put it another way, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Attributions for these quotes are so dubious I shan’t repeat them here. We’ll just let it go at anonymous.
Rumsfeld on France
Thank you Clark Smith. “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was apparently not fond of the French military. However mean-spirited but hilariously, he is reported to have observed:
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."
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Ancient Variation
That last quote reminds me of Gloria Steinem’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
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Fox News Defined
“Fox News is to journalism what the Mafia is to capitalism — same basic genre, but a morally corrupt perversion of the real thing.”
―Tom Friedman
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The American Voter
Voter: “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Stevenson supposedly replied. “I need a majority.”
―Two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, apocryphal
“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor
I have been saying this of myself for decades, albeit not as succinctly. My late mother said the same thing was true for her.
Changing fortunes in the gas pumping business have robbed me of one of my personal favorite tics.
When there was a choice of self-serve or having someone else pump my gas, I always chose full service. Passengers would say, “Why not save the five cents a gallon?” I responded, “I didn’t pay $10,000 for an MIT education so I could pump gas.”
Which shows, of course, how long ago I went to college (a half century).
Another Garbled Quote
The life of quotations amazes me. While I love my UPI chat group, they don’t always double-check the provenance and exact wording of quotes. A garbled but still accurate version of this quote (which I loved and should be inscribed of the top of the PCs of every political reporter and editor) appeared last week.
“It is very difficult to predict — especially the future.”
―probably NOT Niels Bohr; most likely a Danish parliamentarian between 1935 and 1939.
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Some Accurate Quotes
My mentor, Edwin Diamond, often said, “Life is a shit sandwich, and every day you take another bite.” My mom said, “Life is short and then you die, but have a nice day anyway.” I: believe a better expression is: “Life is a 21,000 course meal. Savor them all. Dessert will be here soon enough, and no one knows if the after-dinner drinks are any good.”
From Tom Rush in his weekly newsletter, some funny ones:
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
- Oscar Wilde
"He had delusions of adequacy."
- Walter Kerr
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
- Oscar Wilde
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
- Groucho Marx
From my friend Clark Smith:
“Lord, grant me patience. For if you grant me strength, I will also need bail money.”
-the Book of Comic Prayer
From my UPI chat group:
“Who, in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny (that) the 20th century was entirely mine? All of it, Kevin! Mine!”
- Al Pacino, playing Satan, in the movie The Devil's Advocate.
Readers of this column surely remember Dan Quayle’s term as vice president) He was described in my UPI chat group as,“not only almost cutely benign in retrospect, but a minor hero of Jan 6 [He advised Pence not to try to overthrow the election results].”
Here’s a collection of Quayle quotations collected by Associate Professor of Finance Rauli Susmel from the University of Houston C. T. Bauer College of Business.