[Ads-l] Loving Humanity and Hating People

Charles C Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Fri Dec 22 13:10:53 UTC 2017


And Jonathan Swift somewhere said the opposite (about individual friends--not about a dog).


--Charlie

________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2017 3:49:47 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Loving Humanity and Hating People

The Twain attributed quotation is popular and several researchers have
explored it. I just found an 1822 match in French which antedates the
1847 citation given in the top references. I will post it when I get a
chance unless someone finds an earlier citation.

Garson

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> cf. “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog”—
> —attributed, no doubt incorrectly, to Mark Twain
>
>> On Dec 21, 2017, at 3:07 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>>
>> "The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."
>> Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880, transl. by Constance
>> Garnett, 1912)
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1919 play "Aria da Capo" has the line "I love
>>> humanity but I hate people."  The idea must be older than that.  Can anyone
>>> point me to earlier variants on this quotation?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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