Quote Investigator
Finds
- "My Ignorance Is Just as Good as Your Knowledge" It is Asimov's, from Newsweek in 1980
- The Supreme Art of the Teacher Einstein's line on teaching, traced to a German inscription for a 1931 observatory plaque at Pasadena Junior College, not to his speech.
- Life Is Like a Roll of Toilet Paper The folksy line about time speeding up, usually pinned on Andy Rooney, traced to an anonymous quip in a 1985 Jacksonville column.
- Life Without Love Is Like a Sunless Garden When the Flowers Are Dead Credited to Oscar Wilde, but the line surfaces only in 1949, nearly fifty years after his death
- There Will Never Be a Robot, a Tireless Mechanism Performing All the Functions of a Man A 1927 New York Times science writer called robots impossible, and Chesterton doubted a robot schoolmaster
- Heaven Help America When She Loses Faith in Slogans Sir Josiah Stamp said it in 1932, with the Depression as his backdrop
- Art Is Born of Constraint, Lives by Struggle, and Dies of Freedom André Gide said it in 1904, citing a flaw in Michelangelo's marble
- The Day Came When the Risk to Remain Tight in a Bud The line everyone credits to Anaïs Nin has no evidence behind it
- Blessed Are the Cracked, for They Shall Let in the Light Credited to Groucho Marx and Spike Milligan, but traced to a Dr. Parr in 1830
- It Is Impossible To Make Anything Foolproof Because Fools Are So Ingenious J. R. Williams drew it in a 1942 comic strip, fifty years before Douglas Adams got the credit
- Quacks Are the Greatest Liars in the World, Except Their Patients Franklin said it to Rush in 1788, and flagged it as somebody else's line
- The Most Common Way People Give Up Their Power Credited to Alice Walker since 1999 — and no one else has a stronger claim
- A World Market for About Five Computers The most-quoted bad prediction in computing has no source
- All true stories end in death Hemingway wrote a longer, better sentence
- It ain’t bragging if you can do it Dizzy Dean said something slower and better
- I find ecstasy in living Emily Dickinson said it out loud; a 1940 anthology turned it into a letter
- The shoeshine boy and the stock market Wall Street's favourite exit signal, traced to a book from 1959
- “When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them” Traced to a Wellesley commencement stage in May 1997
- When the bird and the book disagree A birdwatcher's proverb that Audubon never said
- Don't just do something. Sit there. Widely credited to Thich Nhat Hanh; first found in 1954, as orders written for men stationed alone on radar platforms at sea.
- No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood Credited to Ruskin and to Douglas Adams; actually Sydney J. Harris
- Samuel Johnson on Concentration The most quoted line about focus was cover for a forgery
- The People Have Spoken — The Bastards The best concession speech in American politics, possibly never conceded
- The books nobody reads Mark Twain, in an 1906 letter to General Frederick D. Grant, on why lecture audiences never notice he's repeating himself.
- The 'five-minute conversation' quote isn't Churchill's Quote Investigator finds no trace of it in his writings
- Kenneth Boulding on how things got that way A one-line theory of everything
- Moritz Goldschmidt on seeing the world The oldest source for a much-misattributed line
- Jack London on keeping a notebook Slap into it every stray thought
- Van Gogh on silencing self-doubt Paint all the more, and the voice goes quiet
- Alfréd Rényi on Mathematics The famous coffee-into-theorems line, finally attributed correctly.
- Arthur C. Clarke: "Stepping stones to higher things" Arthur C. Clarke on the privilege of being part of an unfinished arc — surfaced by Quote Investigator from a 1964 BBC interview.
- Philipp von Jolly: "In physics, almost everything is already discovered" Quote Investigator traces the famous 'physics is finished' line — usually attributed to Lord Kelvin — to a paraphrase of Philipp von Jolly's advice to a young Max Planck.
- Judy Garland: "'Twas not my lips you kissed, but my soul" Quote Investigator traces a widely-attributed Sarah Bernhardt / Mary Magdalene line to a 1939 Judy Garland poem, My Love Is Lost.
- William Arthur Ward: "Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think" Quote Investigator traces 'Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think.' to William Arthur Ward's 1968 compilation Thoughts of a Christian Optimist.
- Victor Borge: "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people" Quote Investigator traces the famous Borge line to a 1972 appearance — the canonical attribution holds up, surprisingly.
- "Do Not Confine Your Children to Your Own Learning" Quote Investigator traces a parenting line often misattributed to Tagore
- "Nobody Notices When Things Go Right" Quote Investigator traces Zimmerman's Law of Complaints to 1978
- Boulay de la Meurthe — "Worse than a crime; it was a blunder" Not Talleyrand, not Fouché, not Napoleon
- "If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research." Almost universally attributed to Einstein, almost certainly not his — and a more honest description of how research actually proceeds.
- Lifetime Ration of Exclamation Points — "three" A working rule for prose: three exclamation points per career, used wisely.
- Samuel Goldwyn — "Let's have some new cliches." Samuel Goldwyn — Polish-born MGM founder famed for self-contradicting one-liners ('Goldwynisms') — on the perpetual demand for fresh language.
- Geoffrey Hinton — "We have discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it's not for us." Geoffrey Hinton — the 'godfather of deep learning' who left Google in 2023 to speak openly about AI risk — on the asymmetry between digital minds and biological ones.
- Christopher Reeve — "What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely." Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman through four films and the eventual paraplegic advocate, on what actually constitutes heroism.
- Stendhal — "God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist" Quote Investigator nails the 175-year provenance
- Wayne Dyer — "Change the way you look at things" Not Max Planck, despite what the internet insists