"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Don’t believe quotation websites
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#22Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#23It'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 reli…
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.
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#24"Ceci n'est pas une citation"
- René Magritte
("this is not a quote")
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#25Relatedly, Martin Porter (of Porter stemmer fame) has a great pair of essays on the famous Burke quote about the triumph of evil (which, of course, he never said), starting with http://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#26"Ceci n'est pas une citation" - René Magritte ("this is not a quote")
though, in magritte's case, the visual-linguistic paradox is central; to claim that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe requires the pipe to exist as a physical, real object. in this case, a citation is a linguistic creation, which can be faked but cannot exist as the real.
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#27It'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 reli…
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 quot…
"Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it" -- thomasahle, 28 Jan 2016
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#28"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
I always considered that quote something the rest of the world made up in jest, because in retrospect, that wasn't enough memory and it was annoying. im kinda surprised people apparently think it is something anybody ever actually said.
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#29It'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 reli…
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 quot…
> 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.
Re: Don’t believe quotation websites
#30If you create a website with wrongly attributed quotes Google will pick it up. And the more people complain and link to your website as incorrect the more popular it will get and eventually people just start making memes and sharing on all social networks and then the quotes becomes true in the eyes of the googlers.
If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?
> If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?
I think that's funny as a question, but has the wrong premise. There is no 'actual' meaning of words; they have meaning only by mass human consensus. (What is the actual meaning of 'flumbiliable'?) By contrast, there is an 'actual' first utterer of a quote, whether or not there is any consensus on his or her identity.
(I suppose that you could argue, though, that it is only mass observation of a quote that makes it a quote per se, rather than just something I said; if I mutter something under my breath, and it later occurs as a widely quoted line in a movie, then should it be attributed to me, to the screenwriter, or to the character who said it?)