About to Quote Someone? Think Twice
Go in fear of using others’ words.
‘He who echoes the speech of better men is like a peasant, clothing himself in the robes of emperors.’ — Aristotle
I should mention right off the bat that Aristotle did not say the words I have written above. No one said them. I dreamt them up at twelve minutes past four one morning while wondering what colour to wear to a wedding. (I went with pink.) Perhaps you noticed there was something ‘off’ with the quotation. But in an alarmingly large number of cases, attach a bit of text to the name of a philosopher et voilà, you will shut down your reader’s critical faculties and have them nodding along in agreement.
It is easy, in other words, to make something seem deep and meaningful, even so as to preclude the possibility of any kind of assessment, by ascribing it to some famous figure. But many quotations which seem on the surface to be profound or trenchant by dint of being said by someone accomplished would strike us as trite if we ignored the name of that person and took the time to think about what they meant. ‘One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,’ said Stalin. Is that profound? It sounds more like common sense to me; but attributing it to Stalin gives it a certain clout. He did, after all, kill quite a few people, which makes him something of an expert in what psychologists call ‘psychic numbing’. But we hardly learn anything new. The quotation does not even do much to tell us how callous and cynical Stalin was. At any rate, did we not think the disappearances, the purges, the Holodomor, and so on spoke for themselves? It seems that with the right name attached to it, the bland becomes the profound.
‘One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,’ said Stalin. Is that profound? It sounds more like common sense to me.
There is in fact no evidence Stalin said those words, which points to the fact that half the quotations we hear or read were never said by the person who is supposed to have said them. There is an Einstein quotation about insanity and doing the same thing again and again that was in fact said by a character in a novel; there is a Marilyn Monroe quote about ‘well-behaved women’ whose originator was the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (She wrote this in an article about Puritan funeral services, and rather than urge women to rebel or be less well-behaved, she was trying to say that well-behaved women should make history.) We are led to wonder if these misattributions were accidental. Could it be the case that these words were put in the mouth of someone famous to make them seem in some way more legitimate, or more accessible, or to alter their meaning? Take this one: ‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ So said Benjamin Franklin. Or not. In the third century B.C., the Confucian scholar Xun Kuang said: ‘What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.’ And I should add that, when I went to check this the other morning, it turned out that even what I have just written was not quite what was supposedly written by Xun Kuang. The quotation, in rough translation, is: ‘Not hearing is not as good as hearing, hearing is not as good as seeing, seeing is not as good as knowing, knowing is not as good as acting; true learning continues until it is put into action.’
But I risk veering off course. The claim that the sayer legitimates what is said because their circumstances prove its truth assumes an unprovable link between where we are in life, and our explanation for why we are where we are. In other words, we cannot know exactly why we are successful or unsuccessful, even if we can make some guesses. (How certain TED talkers and influencers seem so sure about this sort of thing is beyond me.) It is natural to take something that Plato or Steve Jobs or Anna Wintour says about their area of expertise more seriously than something said by your friend Bob (never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story), but it still does not mean their reasoning is right. There are uncountable reasons why someone gets where they are, and in any case, we are all hamstrung by our governing perspective on the world: we conveniently fail to recognise all the factors outside of our control that happened to played a part in our good (or bad) fortune. We tend to privatise our successes (‘it was all my hard work!’) and socialise our losses (‘it was all their fault’).
It is worth bearing in mind before you start Googling ‘inspirational quotes’ in a bid to give your next presentation some dash that there will at least be some people in the room who recognise an appeal to authority when they see one. Deliberately or not, those who deploy quotations in service of an argument are hoping that the people they have quoted give weight to their claim or, ideally, that they will intimidate their audience into keeping silent. It is fallacious to say that this or that is true simply because this or that person thought it was, however breathtakingly intelligent they may be; yet we do it all the time. It is a sneaky and clever tactic because, being social creatures, we tend to want to lessen conflict and conform — so we want to have sources of authority in common. An appeal to a source agreed to be authoritative plays to this need. Try it out: attribute something to Einstein and see how many people call it out as nonsense. This kind of appeal happens an awful lot in corporate environments, which is hardly surprising because in any human grouping directed towards a common goal, consensus is not just valuable but to a great extent necessary. We want to be on the same page so we can move forward together.
Deliberately or not, those who deploy quotations in service of an argument are hoping that the people they have quoted give weight to their claim or simply intimidate their audience into keeping silent.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with a good quotation. For one thing, it can be dishonest to paraphrase without attribution to the person we are paraphrasing. More still: good quotations can work like metaphors, clarifying what we are trying to get across, or helping to make something stick, or diversifying our speech or writing to make it a bit more interesting. A good quotation, equally, can serve as a kind of mental frame for other ideas, as something sturdy to which we can fix our knowledge while it is, if you like, under construction, or as a rule of thumb. And if we can find compelling proof that what was said really was said, and by the person said to have said it, then we can amuse ourselves trying to think of all the ways that it is false, and get a little thrill at having slapped down Marcus Aurelius, or Goethe, or Marie Curie, or whomever.
So go in fear of quotations. They do not automatically make a thought more profound, or a point more persuasive, and much of the time they are nonsense anyway. They are much more likely to discourage any original or critical thinking, on the part of the person reeling them off and those listening or reading, than to nourish it. Per Mencken: ‘The truly civilized man is always sceptical … his culture is based on “I am not too sure.”’ (That one was real. I think.)
