Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein walk into a bar...
Les Oswald talks about quotes and misquotes.
So, Benjamin
Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein walk into a bar. The bartender
turns to them and says, "So, which of you is misquoted most often?"
All three of them raised their hands… as well as everybody else in the bar:
Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, George Carlin, Eleanor Roosevelt,
and Helen Keller. It's not much of a punchline, but you get the idea.
I've been in love
with quotations ever since I was a kid. I've been collecting them, arranging
them, using them, and everything. With the advent of the Internet, it has been
fantastic because you can look up anything quoted by anybody. Unfortunately, a
lot of those quotations just don't measure up.
I found a quote by
Albert Einstein that, as an educator, I just loved. "Everybody's a genius,
but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll live its whole
life believing that it is stupid!" Unfortunately, Einstein never said that.
Somebody else did. Come to find out the person who did say it was an educator and the quote is terrific
because it's kind of motivating, and allows us non-geniuses to feel like we're in
the same ballpark as an Albert Einstein. But what happened was somebody liked
the quotation, didn't feel like it had enough credibility or enough
"authority." So they attributed it to Albert Einstein and got a whole
lot more mileage that way.
The thing is, we
have the ability to be writers ourselves. If you write something really
creative or motivating, I'd really like
the opportunity to quote you! We don't have to borrow credibility from somebody
else. We can pass along what you wrote
or what you said and get a whole lot of
mileage out of it. We can build up your own credibility or your own authority.
