Our quotes had to be attributed and approved by the teachers. Mine was an Irish drinking song, er, sorry, traditional Irish song. Heh.
-Lil
Obviously, if you went to the high school in the OP, that quote would be disallowed. Excess drinking is bad for you and alcohol is illegal if you’re a teenager. Now be good and go pick something from Shakespeare, Twain, or the Bible, please.
Yes, like:
For a quart of Ale is a dish for a King.
-William Shakespeare
or:
I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.
-William Shakespeare
or:
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
-Mark Twain
or:
Let’s get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father. :eek:
-Deuteronomy
or how 'bout:
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so
- William Shakespeare
Aha! So Vince plagiarized Hitler! Who’d have guessed?
Actually, Genesis
Peter Gabriel wrote that?
It’s not clear whether the yearbook editor checked the quotes before knowing their source. It seems that if they allowed them once, they should remain. The only thing that might restrict that is the context — an inoffensive quote taken out of context would be offensive if the context were reasonably expected to be known.
But the mere source does not define the context, and I don’t think the context of the chosen quotes affect their meaning enough.
They should have pulled quotes from someone nice, like Gandhi :
Did anyone else think this thread was going to be like this :
that’s actually what I came to this thread to read…nah, not really…
but i do think that it’s neat (wow, I’m a nerd…like I just said neat) that people can put quotes in yearbooks…or did they write them in by hand? I’m confused. A lot of people signed yearbooks at my school, but we weren’t permitted to place quotes in the text unless you worked for the yearbook and snuck one in without anyone noticing.
Well, yeah, but he would have said it in German. If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.
:smack:
I *knew *that. The website I took it off of (being too lazy to type it all out) got it wrong. Damn copy and paste. Turns my brain off.
I thought Vince Lombardi said “If you lose, you’re out of the family!”
I don’t know about that one but I he reportedly did used to tell his players, “i don’t care if you win or lose as long as you win.”
But was Vince quoting Hitler?
Sorry, that’s a Simpsons reference.
As seniors, we put in a list of our activities and a quote; there was an area next to our portraits with pretty generous room for the text. I edited the senior pages and don’t remember anything inappropriate; I also don’t remember The Administration reviewing the books but I guess they must have.
Bolding mine.
Ok, I’m not sure I understand how this could be possible. Exactly what kind of legal trouble could they find themselves facing? What is illegal about quoting anyone? And furthermore, why wasn’t a simple standard disclaimer supplied? You know, like “the views represented herein are not those of the school district, the principle, the janitor or 5th grade social studies, blah, blah, blah”, so that an apology was unnecessary. Which, for the life of me, they would think is needed for the opinion of one of their students. I mean, did they feel without it parents would storm the front office demanding to know whether or not they were promoting Nazism?
In other words, I’m thinking this tempest wouldn’t even hold down a teacup and if my (hypothetical) kid really did attend there, I’d be more offended by their over-reaction to a non-issue than anything else. Especially since it doesn’t address the greater whole of a more interesting subject.
Actually, I thought it’d be about what Hitler wrote in yearbooks, like:
Dearest Eva,
How come you never invite me to your place in Munich? One day I shall give you the world, or die trying!
Yours, Dolffie.
That’s a Phil Collins line if ever I heard one.
Schools get sued for a lot less than that. I could see a litigous Jewish parent claiming emotional distress on behalf of their child, for example. It might get thrown out of court, but it would still cost the school a bundle and the advisor his job. Disclaimers wouldn’t work because the yearbook is an official publication of the school. The principal is responsible for everything in it. It isn’t a newspaper printing an editorial or reader’s letters. Different rules apply.
Ah, I see now. Thanks silenus.
[I would have replied sooner, but for some reason, my subscription didn’t send me an update on this thread via email. I hate it when it does that.]
This, like the crypto-Hitlerism described in the OP, is an example of disingenuously selective editing. Gandhi did write two letters to Hitler, in 1939 and 1940, urging him to stop his aggressive expansion in Europe and embrace non-violence. Although Gandhi maintained in those letters his irenic commitment to “loving one’s enemy” and appealing to the better nature even of people who didn’t seem to have one, he definitely pulled no punches about his opposition to Hitler’s actions:
Anybody who really thinks that Gandhi’s rhetorical olive-branches, such as the use of the term “friend”, meant that Gandhi was actually a supporter of Hitler’s policies is completely ignorant of the facts of the matter.