Never Again Means Nothing if Holocaust Analogies Are Always Off Limits

The whole business organisation of misattributing quotes certainly didn't begin with the Internet—it'south been going on as long every bit anyone can remember: Once a famous person gets a reputation for saying witty, profound or inspiring things, people tend to attribute quotes to them that audio like something they might have said, but that they didn't actually say.

Garson O'Toole—a pen name used by the writer who bills himself "The Internet's Foremost Quote Investigator"—calls people similar Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Albert Einstein, Yogi Berra, Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe "quote superstars." Such famous and charismatic people often become "hosts" for quotations they never uttered, O'Toole writes in his new book, "Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Backside Familiar Quotations."

Albert Einstein (Credit: Fred Stein Archive)

For instance, take these often repeated and reprinted Albert Einstein quotes—none of which the great physicist actually said:

"Not everything that counts can exist counted."

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

"Two things inspire me to awe–the starry heavens above and the moral universe within."

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"Pedagogy is that which remains, if i has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"When you sit with a nice girl for 2 hours you think it'due south only a minute, but when you sit down on a hot stove for a minute y'all think it's two hours. That's relativity."

Now here's the existent deal on these quotes:

"Non everything that counts can be counted."
As O'Toole writes in his volume, credit for this quote should go to the sociology professor William Bruce Cameron, who included it in a couple of articles and a 1963 textbook. Einstein patently wasn't associated with the saying until the mid-1980s, some three decades afterwards his death.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
A favorite of politicians (and pretty much everybody else), this quote has been wrongly attributed to Benjamin Franklin likewise equally—merely at that place's no evidence either of them said it. "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein," an administrative complexity of his most memorable utterances, identified the quote as a misattribution, and mentioned its use in the 1983 novel "Sudden Death" by Rita Mae Brown. On his website, Quote Investigator, O'Toole traced, the link betwixt insanity and repetition dorsum to at least the 19th century, only noted its employ in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet as well as novels (including Brown'southward), TV shows and diverse other sources.

"Anybody is a genius. Merely if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life assertive that it is stupid."
No substantive evidence exists suggesting Einstein made this statement, though it (as O'Toole wrote on his website) has been attributed to him in at to the lowest degree one self-assist volume. In fact, the quote tin be traced to a well-established apologue involving animals doing incommunicable things, used to illustrate the fallacy of judging someone past a skill or ability that person (or animate being) does not possess.

"Two things inspire me to awe—the starry heavens to a higher place and the moral universe within."
In fact, this 1 is a version of a statement made non by Einstein only by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his famous "Critique of Applied Reason" (1889). The bodily quote is: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the listen of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and moral law within me."

"Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
In "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein," editor Alice Calaprice antiseptic that Einstein agreed with this statement, but did non actually say it. In fact, he was quoting a passage past an anonymous "wit" in a chapter he wrote on teaching, included in his book "Out of My Later Years."

"When you sit with a dainty daughter for 2 hours you remember it's only a infinitesimal, but when you sit down on a hot stove for a infinitesimal you think it's two hours. That's relativity."
This admittedly brilliant explanation of Einstein's most famous theory is non something he himself said, but comes from an anecdote that was reportedly circulating around him in 1929, when it appeared in a New York Times article almost him. The reporter put the anecdotal argument in quotation marks, and poof! A famous (and most likely faux) quote was born.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/here-are-6-things-albert-einstein-never-said

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