Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don’t believe quotation websites

decisionsciencenews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–35 of 35 posts

Re: Don’t believe quotation websites

#31

Post by nitrogen »

huxley wrote: post #23
nitrogen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Don’t believe quotation websites

#32

Post by dang »

weinzierl wrote: post #6

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 reli…

> 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.

Re: Don’t believe quotation websites

#33

Post by dang »

thomasahle wrote: post #9
weinzierl wrote: post #6

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 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…

> 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.

Re: Don’t believe quotation websites

#34

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

wodenokoto wrote: post #28
LeonM wrote: post #10

"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.

And if anyone said it, it wouldn't be Bill Gates, because it wasn't Microsoft who set the memory limits of the IBM PC.
Post reply on HN