“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” - Mark Twain
Ever since Sunday, I have seen this quote attributed to Mark Twain. I’m unable to find an original source for it. One person claims it is not Twain at all, but a bastardization of a quote by Clarence Darrow.
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” - Clarence Darrow
I’ve mostly seen this quote attributed to Mark Twain, but also saw one web site that had it credited to Will Rogers.
Dorothy Parker for me.
Well, it’s listed in Darrow’s own obituary from 1938, though the list-of-quotes format is never entirely convincing to me.
“Quote” sites are absolute factories of perpetuating misattributions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/atlantic/20110503/ts_atlantic/marktwaindidntsaythingaboutobituaries37279
i agree wholeheartedly with spark. Most quotation cites don’t check their quotations, and do their best to perpetuate misattribution. Look back at my posts about the supposed Plato quote about being kind, because everyone you meet is on a great journey.
And Twain has probably had more quotes erroneously attributed to him than anyone else. The Burns book on Twain has an entire section in it devoted to “quotations” he never said.
I have found www.wikiquote.org to be pretty good for tracking down quotes. It lists the Twain quote in question under “Unsourced/Possible Fakes”.
It seems that, whenever people have a clever, folksy quote and don’t know who said it, they ascribe it to Mark Twain. If they have a clever catty quote and don’t know who said it, they ascribe it to Oscar Wilde. If they have a sort-of-stupid quote and don’t know who said it, they ascribe it to Yogi Berra. If they have what they think is a profound, inspirational quote, they’ll ascribe it to Gandhi or to some Native American chief.
If Twain were alive, he’d tell you (as Yogi famously did) “I didn’t really say all the things I said.”
“The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you can never know if they are genuine.” --Abraham Lincoln
"The trouble with the French is they don’t even have a word for ‘entrepreneur’ " - George W. Bush…
My favourite misattributed quote - he never said it, but he should have.
Hah! I love that one, but are you sure it wasn’t Ben Franklin who said that?
No, he said: “I have had many emails from young Russian women seeking to marry a rich American, but I can never tell if they are genuine.”
True, but it was Thomas Jefferson who put it best:
"Dear Mr. Nigerian Prince,
Your business offer intrigues me, and I would like to send you my bank account information post-haste.
Right after you kiss my ass! What, do you think I was born but a fortnight ago?
Yours,
Thomas ‘2nd most badass president after Teddy Roosevelt’ Jefferson"
According to the Yale Book of Quotations, Darrow said in testimony before a congressional committee on Feb. 1, 1926, “We’re all killers at heart . . . . I have never taken anybody’s life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.”
No – he would have been unable to pronounce ‘entrepreneur’ correctly.
This article discusses a recently popular fake Martin Luther King Jr quote, and how it was debunked.
Now, now, let’s not misunderestimate his speaking abilities.
I think he’s in a race with Dorothy Parker.
“I have never killed anyone, but I have often read about some guy getting his ass taken out with great pleasure” - Oscar Wilde
Shouldn’t misunderestimate mean that Bush really is that bad? You mistakenly thought you were underestimating him.
