[Ads-l] "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes"

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes"
> --attributed two days ago to Mark Twain by America's documentarian laureate
> Ken Burns on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Burns is obviously
> unfamiliar with Garson's QI entry,
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/, which would have
> set him straight.  Of course, as noted in the entry, Burns isn't alone in
> his misapprehension. That Twain was certainly a quote magnet for the ages.

Thanks for your note, LH.

I am surprised that Ken Burns would make that attribution. He produced
a documentary about Mark Twain back in 2001, and the companion
biography included a page about remarks that have been ascribed to
Twain without support. Hence, Burns should be aware of the
misquotation problem.

[ref] 2001, Mark Twain by Dayton Duncan and Geoffrey C. Ward, Based on
a Documentary by Ken Burns, What Twain Didn’t Say, Quote Page 189,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York. (Verified with hardcopy) [/ref]

[Begin excerpt]
Mark Twain is probably the most quoted American of all time. It seems
as if he had something memorable to virtually every topic. But over
the years, he has also become routinely cited as the source of many
remarks that in reality were someone elses.
. . .
The following are a few well-known "Twainisms," compiled by Jim Zwick,
that have not been documented as actually being Twain's words. Perhaps
because they are so good, people have assumed only Mark Twain could
have coined them.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

If you don't like the weather, wait a minute.

A gold miner is a liar standing next to a hole in the ground.

When I feel the urge to exercise, I go lie down until it passes away.

I don’t exaggerate—I just remember big.

Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and
remove all doubt.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who
can't read them

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly
stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I
was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
[End excerpt]

I first saw this list more than a decade ago. Now the QI website has
an article for each one of these expressions except one.

Garson

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