Quotations Weblog

Here is an excerpt from Nice Guys Finish Seventh. It’s a book about misquotations that looks interesting.

• Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations

He’s right about the attribution of quotes:

To be accurate, therefore, reference books should attribute “No man who hates dogs and children can be all bad,” to the Times reporter. His name was Byron Darnton. Byron who? That’s just the point. Who’s heard of Byron Darnton? Yet most of us know the name W.C. Fields. This is why Fields routinely gets credit for someone else’s words. He probably always will.

Politicians have speech writers. Should the speech writers get the credit? Actors and studios have spin doctors. Should the quotes go to the spin doctor who thought of the saying? It’s all a very messy situation that we run into all the time at The Quotations Page.

If discussions like this interest you, look at our Quotations Forum:

• Quotations Page Forum – Who Said That?

We get a couple of questions every day there and it’s an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon: researching the origin of a quote.

All,

1. What is the justification of including “attributed” quotes here? What are the standards for concluding that an attribution is correct?

2. Should quotes that are “attributed” be included here at all? ever?

3. If “Yes”, then shouldn’t there be some attribution of the attribution? eg: Max Born in his autobiography quotes Albert Einstein as having said “….”.

I would be uneasy ever using any “quote” that can only be vaguely, without reference, rhyme, or reason, “attributed”.

Anyone?

Kip Hansen

Kip,

The short answer is that the “Attributed” tag means we have a strong suspicion that the quote is wrongly attributed and is not really the work of the quoted author.

So why is the quote still there? One of two reasons:

1. We haven’t determined the true attribution yet, but we don’t want the quotation to be missing if someone searches for it.

2. People commonly attribute the quotation to the supposed author, so we include it under their name where people will be looking for it. In these cases, there is usually a note indicating the true author. See for example the following quotation commonly attributed to Voltaire:

• Quote Details: Voltaire: I disapprove of what… – The Quotations Page

Ideally we would only have quotations in the second category, but we have a limited amount of time for tracking down quotation sources.

Incidentally, you would be pleased to know that there is also a “verified” flag in our database, which will indicate quotations with a verified attribution. This will become visible when we update the site in a month or two.

Michael Moncur
Owner and maintainer, The Quotations Page

Many of our readers have collections of their own and would like to give us quotes that we are missing from our website. We appreciate all submissions so much that we have set up a form to use to submit quotations. You can find it here:

• The Quotations Page: Contribute a Quotation

In case you’re thinking about adding quotations using our Contributed Quotations form, here are some tips that will ensure that your quote gets added:

• Spelling counts: If the quote you have added is misspelled or is lacking punctuation, it will not be considered. If we have to proof-read your submission, it will be deleted, not added to the collection.

• Include the author: If you type I don’t know, unknown or anonymous in the author field, we won’t even look at your submission. If you don’t know the author, it’s just a pretty thought, not a quotation.

• Don’t quote yourself: If you are quoting yourself, it’s not a quote, it’s publication. We won’t consider adding submissions that are self-quotes.

• Don’t quote bumper stickers: I know they’re witty, but they fall into the category of unknown authors. We want attributions.

• Include the source: Including the book, movie, website, etc. where you got the quote greatly improves the odds that it will be chosen to add to the collection.

• Unique sources are a plus: If you quote a video game, a webcomic, a comic book or television show with the author’s name and the source, you are almost guaranteed to have the quotation added to the collection. We are always on the lookout for unique quotes. You’ll even get extra bonus points for additional information like television episode, URL or series number.

We have a three-tiered system to our quotations collections. The collections that you see are added personally by Mike and I. The contributed quotes sit in a file until one of the two of us goes through it and either approves or deletes it. When a contributed quotation is approved, it doesn’t get added to our collection, only the Contributed Quotations collection, which is only searchable with extra effort. After a quote has been in the Contributed Quotations collection for a while, we will eventually add it to ours. We go through this process to preserve accuracy and even then, we get things wrong.

If you find a quotation that is incorrect, please tell us. It’s really easy to do. Each quote has its own page and there is a link for each one where you can email us. Click on the sentence: “Notice an error or discrepancy? Send us a comment about this quotation,” and we will be able to correct the quote.

Thank you to all of the people who have entered their favorite quotations into our Contributed Quotations collection. We appreciate your dedication to your favorite thoughts.

About once a month, someone attempts to correct us on the quotation above. Kilgore Trout, as they know, is a fictional character that appears in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s works, so they assume we’ve mistakenly attributed the quotation to Philip Jose Farmer.

As it turns out, our attribution is correct: While Kurt Vonnegut invented the fictional Kilgore Trout, and also invented his fictional novel Venus on the Half Shell, a real novel was later published with the same title, by an author using the pseudonym Kilgore Trout, who turned out to be Philip Jose Farmer. I’m not certain whether Vonnegut gave permission for the use of the title, but he disapproved of the final result.

For more information:

• Wikipedia – Kilgore Trout