“It’s easier to fool people than convince them they’ve been fooled.”
I keep seeing it today on Facebook, but I see no authoritative citation that indicates he ever said or wrote it.
Anyone?
Wikiquote has nothing, unless the paraphrase is very different. And they also store misattributions. Generally speaking, “quotes” by Twain, Wilde, Churchill, et al., are often really said by someone else, misquotes, or made up more often than not.
“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” - Abraham Lincoln.
Sounds more like PT Barnum.
So I assume no, then. Figured as much. I wonder when it started getting accredited to him. Google it and you’ll see a lot of hits for him.
I wrote that.
Fucking Twain always takes my best shit.
not certain whether he said it or that the mistaken attribution proves how true it is
This seems to be a good source Mark Twain quotations - Fool and it does not list that quote.
This is beside the point, but a guy in high school convinced another that the word “gullible” is not in the dictionary. Pure genius, if you ask me.
Not even, I suspect, by Zombie Mark Twain.
It’s not just quotes by Mark Twain that are misattributed. Anymore, I don’t trust ANY quotes on the internet that don’t have a citation. I’ve written on this Board about other “false quotes”, like the one supposedly by Plato that Sarah Palin used. Recently I debunked one from some glurge that a relative sent me.
As far as this one goes, I observe that using Google n-gram viewer, I can’t find it attributed to anyone before 2000. It’s not in Wikiquote, even as a spurious quote. And this page doesn’t believe it either. It’s worth quoting the page: And again, more mis-attributed quotes online – Scripturient
Well anyway, on the internet , I read that Quora attributed it to him …
How 'bout if I just attribute the quote to The Straight Dope Message Board?