[Ads-l] Groucho--really?

[Jonathan Lighter]

1869  _Putnam's Monthly Magazine_ (Jan.) 106: Now is the solitary point of
interest for us. The Past is dead; the Future is unborn; this Present is
all that lives!

Perhaps Fred or Garson has something earlier....

JL



On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 1:14 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Mar 10, 2017, at 12:39 PM, GEOFFREY NUNBERG <nunbergg at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > The following quotation is widely ascribed to Groucho Marx:
> >
> >> I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can
> choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I
> have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
> >
> > I suppose it’s not impossible that Groucho said such a thing in his sad
> dotage, but the tenor is awfully un-Marxian.
>
>
> Yes, it certainly doesn’t seem to sit well with the other classic Marxist
> doctrines, e.g. “Why a duck”, “…Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read”, and
> of course the philosophers’ favorite, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any
> club that would have me as a member”
>
> LH
>
> > Can anybody help to trace the actual source of the quote—or what’s
> really more interesting (if I’m right), its first misattribution?
> >
> > Geoff
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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