paranoid

[victor steinbok]

Yes, I also came across the Burroughs quote, but it was undated and without
a source--and here he's attributing it to someone else. On the other hand,
Kissinger does not strike me as a Burroughs reader--perhaps he read poetry.
One of the quote sites listing Schwartz fought back:

Delmore Schwartz, American poet
> circa 1950's
> Often misattributed to Henry Kissinger
> or to being an "old saying"


That's fine, but still no source. And Kissinger is not a misattribution--he
really did say it, just was not the first (nor, obviously, was Rahm
Emanuel).

One Salon article even claims "the all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz
-- best remembered for the proverb "even paranoids have real enemies" --
also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment."

So "everyone" seems to know the Schwartz line, but no one cites the original
source.

VS-)

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> The Yale Book of Quotations has the following three items listed in
> one entry. YBQ credits the second and third items below to Cassellā€™s
> Humorous Quotations
>
> Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
>    Catch-22 (motion picture) (1970).
>
> Because a person has monomania she need not be wrong about her facts
>   Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder  Must Advertise ch. 16 [1933]
>
> Has it ever struck you that when people get persecution mania, they
> usually have a good deal to feel persecuted about?
>   C.P.Snow, The Aļ¬€air ch. 11 [1960]
>
>
> Here is a potentially interesting unverified match for the
> paranoid/paranoiacs variant in Google Books:
>
> Esquire: Volume 69
> William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs: The Shoaf Collection
> (University of Virginia Library) - 1968 - Snippet view
> Granted that, as Delmore Schwartz remarked when someone accused him,
> justly, of paranoia, "Even paranoiacs have some real enemies." Still I
> can't believe it since 1) there is no evidence, 2) it runs against my
> whole notion of the ...
>
> Volume 69 is dated (1968:Jan-1968:June)
>
> Garson

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