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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

It's not only quotation websites. In Germany "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" is a well-known quote from Goethe - except that it isn't from Goethe. To the best of my knowledge it is from Blaise Pascal and it took me about an hour of research to be confident enough use the quote with this attribution.

This was way too much time spent for a simple quotation, so my question is: Is there a reliable canonical source for quotations? Maybe something good journalists use?

I know there are several quotation dictionaries but are they any good?

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Interesting. I've always heard that quote ascribed to Niels Bohr.

Perhaps he was just the first Dane to use it. I guess in older times, you could get credit for a quote if you were the first in a country to use it. From http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ it looks like Benjamin Franklin was among the first Americans. But then again, what can we really trust?

Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it.

"Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it" -- thomasahle, 28 Jan 2016

> Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it.

Much like how, when one is in doubt in math, one just calls it Euler's theorem.

> But then again, what can we really trust?

Textual evidence. The first demonstrable text wins, until an earlier is found. Sometimes it's fuzzy, because quotes morph (they get pithier over time). But most of the time it's clear enough, and the techniques for studying it are well understood.

Edit: The same is true in reverse, too: if a famous person really said X, it will be easy to find a precise textual source for X by googling. I don't mean a website claiming they said it (those are legion), but the original text, e.g. from their collected works, or an original newspaper interview. Since they're famous, that territory will have been trodden many times and there will be websites linking to it. Therefore if you can't find it, the famous person probably didn't say it. “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence” (hey, I wonder who said that one?) really works in this case.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is one of the classic gold standards. It's reasonably well-sourced, and it separates out "attributed" but uncomfirmed remarks. It's not as comprehensive as the online sites, since it's edited as a physical book, but it's pretty reliable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartlett%27s_Familiar_Quotatio...

It's an American work, so I don't have a good sense for how well it covers other regions' quotations.

> I know there are several quotation dictionaries but are they any good?

Oh for sure, the best ones are masterpieces of scholarship. Anything edited by Fred Shapiro, for example.

The 'shorter letter' quote, is well known to be from Pascal's letter to his sister (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/). But the smoke of bogus internet attributions can really be hard to see through.

A friend of mine curated a couple hundred pages worth of quotations with citations to original works into a book called Quotes of Note: Brilliant Thoughts Arranged by Subject (there's another Quotes of Note that came later and is probably a TM violation). It's on Amazon.

IANAL and off-topic, but if it was a series title, your friend might have a case but, at least in North America, the titles of single works are generally not protectable under trademark law.

If the book became strongly associated with your friend, then a consumer protection exemption under "Passing Off" rules might allow the work to be protected but the onus would be on your friend to prove it.

My friend's book is indeed a series with different formats and updated editions. The challenge is getting Amazon to care.

It's attributed to Pascal in Robert McKee's screenwriting manual (without a reference); had no idea about the Goethe thing.

Did you find a more reliable citation for it, out of curiosity?

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