The Internet Makes It Easier (and Harder) to Find Original Sources

When the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was first published in 1941, it all seemed so simple. It was taken for granted that a quotation was a familiar line from a great poet or a famous figure in history, and the source could easily be found in standard literary works or history books. Those early compilers of quotations did not think of fake facts and the internet. “Fake facts,” or perhaps more accurately misunderstandings, have been around in the world of quotations for a long time. Often, when people see a line they like, they simply copy it and repeat it. Take, for instance:

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

If (at the time of reading), the words were attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato, this would be repeated too. But in fact it was not Plato who originally said it. Although it is found in his work “The Symposium,” he was explicitly quoting the playwright Euripides.

Sometimes it is even possible to spot the very point at which such mistakes occur.  “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time” is often attributed to the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, but actually first occurs as an editorial comment by the Canadian writer Laurence J. Peter on Russell’s line “The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.” Clearly the aside has taken on more life than the original. On the same page Peter adds to Aristotle’s “The end of labour is to gain leisure” with “so that you can drink coffee on your own time,” but somehow no-one has attributed an enthusiasm for coffee to Aristotle!

More often the transition remains unclear. Over twenty years ago we kept coming across a rather long but very apt quotation, always linked to the Roman satirist Petronius: 

We trained hard…but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

Given that only a limited range of writing by Petronius has survived, it was relatively easy to establish that this was not included, so we...

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