Can I quote you on that?

Earl Fowler

Still had half a bottle of Hai Karate. Didn’t know whether to splash it under my ears, slather it along my neck or just get it over with and down it.

Be careful how you use it.

Point is, the night was thick with Southern Comfort and stale cologne. I was sitting at my desk, the kind of desk that exists only in second-rate detective novels or vintage copies of Green Hornet Comics #10, where you light cigarettes just to watch the smoke swirl in a cloud of unknowing like the plot of some tragic tale. The kind of tale where the facts are slippery, the jacks are one-eyed and the quotes get misattributed.

And no, I don’t mean Fox & Friends.

It was late, but not the kind of late that whispered secrets. No, this was the kind of late that slammed a bottle of whisky on the table, opened its bustier, made graceful mudra gestures with its fingers, stomped bangled feet to bring out the serpentine rippling of the rest of its body, and whispered, “I’ve got a job for you, kid. You and your Old School hunt-and-peck methods.”

The darkness even danced with its eyes.

So, I sat back in my creaky chair, the one with more squeaks than a cemetery gate. My mind was sharp, but my brain was blunted by too many drinks, too many Presbyterians with the same earnest grin, too many copy editors who couldn’t tell their Twain from their Shakespeare.

The phone brought it all down on me. It rang insistently, like an ex-wife on about alimony or something, but with less dignity. Every time we said hello, I died a little.

“Mr. Spade,” the voice on the other end rasped. It had the kind of quality that made you want to check your wallet. “I’ve got a quote for you.”

I leaned back and sucked in the last Pall Mall non-filter in the pack. “Look, Keyes, you’re talking to the wrong guy. I’m an insurance agent. I don’t deal in quotes. I deal in cynical attitudes and motivations, gothic romance with hardboiled dames and cold-blooded contract killings.”

“This one’s different,” he said, his voice cracking like a dry branch under a boot. “This one’s been all over the place — on the lips of politicians, poets, and worse — self-help gurus.”

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“Spit it out,” I growled.

“‘Be the change you want to see in the world,’” he said. “It’s been killing me. You know who said that, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said, flicking the butt but missing the ashtray. “It’s a dandy and it was Gandhi, who also told us that liquor is quicker. Not exactly the most obscure fella in the world.”

“That’s the thing,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “It wasn’t him. It was a guy named … well, some schmuck who sells motivational speaking services now, but he made it sound like a religious epiphany. All over the world, people think the Mahatma said it, and it’s a dirty lie.”

I knew the sound of trouble when it called me by name. Misattributed quotations are the hapless grifters of this town, slipping in between the cracks, where the facts get blurry and the light of truth flickers like a half-burned match. I reached for another pack in my top drawer. Hell’s bells, Muriel! Empty.

Dig if you will this picture: Just before shuffling off the feathered boa, the artist formerly known as alive posed a honey of question: “Who’s pimping who?”

I was just the claims adjuster to find out.

I reached for my trenchcoat, knowing I was about to walk into a mess. I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble, but the world of misattributed quotes isn’t the kind of place you sashay into with a smirk or a sneer.

It’s a place where nobody can hold onto the real thing for more than a minute before it slips away like that late afternoon buzz after a quick stop at the Blue Gardenia. My guaranteed life insurance philosophy, boiled down (no medical exam required): If everyone in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble.

Otherwise, my whole fallacy is wrong.

Did a little checking and found out toot de sweet that my client had the goods on one Mohandas K. Gandhi, reduced in popular culture to a dhoti, a pair of spindly legs and a soundbite that made people feel good about themselves. If you want to be generous, throw in a spinning wheel and a Ben Kingsley Oscar.

What most Westerners have forgotten is that Gandhi didn’t just show up with anodyne clichés. He was a guy who did the hard work — no shortcuts, no catchy phrases. His legacy doesn’t fit on a license plate or a T-shirt; credit him with a philosophy of non-violence grounded in sacrifice and discipline that ended British rule in India.

And now his wisdom and courage have been fitted for candy wrappers. In India, he’s even reviled among the ruling Hindu fascist party for trying to fairly accommodate the country’s large minority Muslim population.

Discouraged, I decamped to a local diner, hoping to get a lead from the kind of lowlifes who spent their time dissecting quotes like they were trying to pick apart a crime scene. It was there I ran into Catherine Tramell, an enigmatic crime novelist who could dot her i’s and cross and uncross her t’s like a house on fire.

Catherine could twist your words like a piano wire, and before you knew it, you’d be tied up with a silk scarf, fatally stabbed with an ice pick and reeling like Johnny Stompanato in Lana Turner’s bedroom.

Dead before you hit the floor.

“Surely …,” Catherine purred, uncrossing her t’s till my eyes were bulging like Peter Lorre’s in The Maltese Falcon. And not just my eyes. One more time and I would have gone off like the rippled skin of an overripe tomato in the hot sun. Full-bore, thermonuclear Marty Feldman!

Her hair was blonde, messy, uncombed. But she had that sexy clean quality I craved in a dame. There was something smouldering underneath that mock innocent façade. “Surely … you know I don’t like to wear any underwear, don’t you Nick?”

“Not unless my eyes deceive me,” I said, scraping them off the floor while spinning on my seat at the North Coast Casualty and Fidelity Insurance Company like the teenage Lana Turner cradling a Coca-Cola at the Top Hat malt shop (and not Schwab’s Pharmacy as you mugs were led to believe).

“And don’t call me Shirley. And who’s Nick? It’s Spade. Sam Spade. The world’s got a case of mistaken identity, and I need to solve it before someone calls René Angélil the father of the French Revolution. Not that he wasn’t there. There was even a maid at the Palace of Versailles who claimed she was touched by an Angélil.”

Catherine chuckled. “Oh, you mean like when people think Mark Twain said, ‘The only two certainties in life are death and taxes’? It was Ben Franklin, old sport.”

I froze. Catherine always had been a wild orchid in a stand of hothouse primroses. And why was she sounding like Jay Gatsby? My lips were suddenly floppy and spraying saliva, like Daffy’s that time Fudd shot his beak off. I heard myself slurring: “You’re despicable.”

She grinned seductively, uncrossed another t. “Oh yeah. All the time, people throw around Franklin’s words like Twain invented them. But I guess if you’re looking for real misquotes, we could talk about Albert Einstein.”

I didn’t need to hear any more. Einstein — now there was a man who couldn’t catch a break. A genius who had an equation for everything except his own reputation. People loved slapping his name on any dumbass notion they had that involved anything remotely intellectual.

Take the quote, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It’s a snappy thing to say, but first showed up in print about 1980 in literature from Narcotics Anonymous, where its earliest use was uncovered by Michael Becker of Becker’s Online Journal.

But “the dopey one,” as the family maid had called the young Einstein while recovering from her earlier groping? He didn’t have time for slogans — he was too busy trying to figure out how time and gravity are really the same thing.

I leaned back in my chair. This was bigger than I thought. This city couldn’t handle the truth. Me, I live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with copies of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

“Don’t be sure that I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” I said, handing Catherine over to the punctuation police despite having fallen for her hard, like my Tesla stock portfolio. “That sort of reputation might be good business, bringing me higher-paid jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”

But sonofa, there are some hardscrabble enemies still at large. And I don’t mean Joel Cairo or the Fat Man. Or the cast of Fox & Friends.

Take, for example, the saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.”

It’s routinely attributed to Twain or Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill, the Big Three when it comes to bogus attributions. But none of them ever said the phrase, early (and unattributed) forms of which first show up in print in the 1820s.

Perhaps because the truth is rarely pure and never simple, Oscar Wilde never said: “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” A version of that one dates to 1967 in the journal The Hudson Review. According to the MLA Style Centre, the earliest known exact quotation is from 1999 on something called Usenet, a precursor to the Internet forums of today.

Here’s another apocryphal “Twainism” that the beloved humourist never said or wrote, according to the Center for Mark Twain Studies: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” Rather, this is a self-serving aphorism that social media influencers (grandes horizontales all) and self-loathing newspaper columnists began citing about 2007.

German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche is renowned for zinger epigrams, but you can search all of his works in vain for the following quotation routinely attributed to him: “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”

Contrary to what I read in a letter from a reader in today’s local newspaper, it wasn’t Churchill who first warned: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That was Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who also offered the germane observation that “skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

After Mafia Don issued an executive fiat on March 1 designating English as the official language of the United States, I received an email from a friend quoting from a speech in which Canada’s second prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, supposedly wrote: “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Canadians, of Canadian nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.”

Nuh-uh. This didn’t sit right since, after all, Laurier was a bilingual, sixth-generation Québécois whose mother tongue was French.

So instead of mindlessly taking the claim for granted and forwarding the thing to 15 friends and acquaintances, it took me all of 10 seconds of extensive online research to suss out that the quote (substituting “Americans” and “American” for “Canadians” and “Canadian") was taken from a letter written by former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

Some hosehead opposed to Canada’s two official languages policy tinkered with the quote, eh. The Internet is of course rife with “give ’er” misinformation and mendacity of this nature, on the sadly effective “Big Lie” principle everyone knows was enunciated by Adolf Hitler’s sidekick, Joseph Goebbels, and perfected by the MAGA zookeepers: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

Thing is, there’s no evidence Goebbels actually said this. A quick explanation from the Jewish Virtual Library:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

This is an excellent definition of the “Big lie,” however, there seems to be no evidence that it was used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, though it is often attributed to him.

The original description of the big lie appeared in Mein Kampf (Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto from 1925). Adolf Hitler applied it to the behaviour of Jews rather than as a tactic he advocated. …

The OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency of the U.S. during the Second World War) psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Hmm. That playbook remind you of anyone now preening erratically on the world stage?

The one unassailable truth in which Trump believes, the veracity of which he has demonstrated throughout his business and political careers, is that you never give a sucker a truthful break. “As long as you keep repeating something,” he told Stephanie Grisham, his White House press secretary from 2019-2020, “it doesn’t matter what you say.”

And as noted curmudgeon H.L. Mencken once observed, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” (Note that Mencken wrote “taste” and not “intelligence,” as that quote is usually rendered, though the latter is equally on point.)

Mencken also wrote that “on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mission accomplished.

And with downright moronity in mind, why not join the fun and misattribute some legendary sayings? If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. You know, like giving Col. Harland Sanders credit for: “Kinky is using a feather. Perverted is using the whole chicken.”

Or:

There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.

— Stephen Hawking

Mordre wol out.

— O.J. Chaucer

A true friend reaches for your hand and touches your … Crikey!

— Steve Irwin

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

— Gottfried Leibniz

Here's looking at you, kid.

— Former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle

They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.

— Immanuel Kant

SAY WHAT AGAIN I DARE YOU I DOUBLE DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKER! SAY WHAT ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME!

— His Holiness Knowing Everything Vajradhara Dalai Lama

You miss 100 per cent of the shots you never take.

— Lee Harvey Oswald

I am liberating man from the degrading chimera known as conscience.

— JD Vance

Wouldn’t it be a better world if not every group thought they had a direct line to God?

— Every sane person who has ever lived

Bottom line, as determined by the little man who lives inside me: Just because a quote sounds good to you doesn’t automatically mean it comes from some celebrated smartypants. Check your sources.

As I left the insurance office, a cold wind slapped me across the face, the fog swirling around my legs like a chorus of ghosts. It wasn’t going to be an easy night. But it was the kind of night where the truth had to be dragged out into the light, even if it wore the wrong name tag.

And don’t let me leave you with the impression that you can never trust an online attribution.

Facebook, X and most of the other Republican-allied social media thimbleriggers no longer allow fact checking, on the profitable principle that free speech includes the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, but you can still have supreme confidence in the authenticity of certain attributions that sound too good not to be true.

For as the fledgling VP is reputed to have exclaimed upon entering the Oval Office for the first time, “My, that’s an attractive … ah, ah … chesterfield!”