The whole citation misattribution thing certainly didn’t start with the Internet; It’s been going on for as long as anyone can remember: once a famous person gets a reputation for saying witty, insightful, or inspiring things, people tend to attribute quotes to them that sound like something they could have said, but didn’t actually say.
Garson O’Toole, a pen name used by the writer who markets himself as “the Internet’s foremost dating researcher,” calls out the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Albert Einstein, Yogi Berra, Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe “superstar dating”. “These famous and charismatic people often become “hosts” for quotes they never uttered, O’Toole writes in his new book:”Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Family Dating.”
Albert Einstein (Credit: Fred Stein Archive)
For example, take these repeated and reprinted quotes from Albert Einstein, none of which the great physicist actually said:
“Not everything that counts can be counted.”
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking that it is stupid.
“Two things amaze me: the starry skies above and the moral universe within.”
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“Education is what remains, if one has forgotten everything they learned in school.”
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
Now here’s the real deal on these quotes:
“Not everything that counts can be counted.”
As O’Toole writes in his book, credit for this quote should go to sociology professor William Bruce Cameron, who included it in a couple of articles and a 1963 textbook. Einstein was apparently not associated with the saying. until the mid-1980s, some three decades after his death.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
A favorite of politicians (and just about everyone else), this quote has also been misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, but there is no evidence that any of them said it. “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein,” an authoritative complication of his most memorable statements, identified the quote as a misattribution and cited its use in Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel “Sudden Death.” On his website, Quote Investigator, O’Toole trackedthe link between insanity and repetition dates back to at least the 19th century, but he noted its use in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet, as well as in novels (including Brown’s), television shows, and various other sources.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking that it is stupid.
There is no substantive evidence to suggest that Einstein made this statement, although (as O’Toole wrote on his website) has been attributed to him in at least one self-help book. In fact, the quote goes back to a well-established allegory involving animals doing impossible things, used to illustrate the fallacy of judging someone for an ability or ability that person (or animal) does not possess.
“Two things amaze me: the starry skies above and the moral universe within.”
In fact, this is a version of a statement made not by Einstein but by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his famous “Critique of Practical Reason” (1889). The actual quote is: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and wonder, the more often and more intensely the thinking mind is drawn to them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”
“Education is what remains, if one has forgotten everything they learned in school.”
In “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, editor Alice Calaprice clarified that Einstein agreed with this statement, but did not actually say it. In fact, she was quoting a passage from an anonymous “wit” in a chapter he wrote on education, included in his book “Out of My Later Years.”
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
This certainly vivid explanation of Einstein’s most famous theory is not something he himself said, but stems from an anecdote that was supposedly circulating around him in 1929, when showed up in a New York Times article about him. The reporter put the anecdotal statement in quotation marks and poof! A famous (and probably false) quote was born.