Food For Thought

A Collection of Heretical Notions and Wretched Adages
compiled by Jack Tourette

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I strive for accuracy and completeness in all my work on FFT, so the reader who wishes to study an author's thinking in depth may easily find the original work. I also want to give credit to the author.

I am always working to improve FFT. Improvements include additions, updates, and corrections. Typical additions are new quotations, or new people in the biography list. Typical updates are adding year-of-death to year-born/year-died information, or adding a middle name to a biographical entry. Corrections may be simple, such as fixing spelling or punctuation errors, or more involved, such as adding a citation to a quotation.

Countless hours of research preceeded the latest update to Food For Thought. I encountered the following problems in my research:

  • Out-of-context quotations
  • Misattributed quotations
  • Paraphrased quotations
  • Bogus quotations
  • Mystery quotations

I've tried to clarify out-of-context quotations by adding more of what the author originally said or wrote.

Misattributed quotations, where found, have been corrected.

For quotations that paraphrase an author's work, I include both the paraphrase (identified as such) and the original work. In cases where differences stem from different translations, I include the translator's name in the citation.

Quotations that experts consider bogus are identified as such, with information provided for more research.

Mystery quotations bother me the most. These are quotations that everyone knows - quotations that are used as epigrams; quoted in essays, books, and speeches; used in email sigs; and listed in web collections. However, they rarely or never identify the source. Some are attributed to more than one person!

FFT still has many mystery quotations, for which I have been unable to identify the original source, in spite of searching original and secondary works and reputable quotation collections, both online and in hardcopy. Ideally, FFT would include source information for every quotation. Unfortunately, there will always be a few for which the original source remains unknown. So, what do I do with mystery quotations? Two possible solutions:

  1. Remove mystery quotations
  2. Identify mystery quotations as suspect
I hate the thought of removing any quotation that has no source information, since the thought expressed has value, whether or not the actual author is known. On the other hand, I hate to perpetuate the (possible) fiction that so-and-so said such-and-such.

I am loath to add the notation "attributed/unverified" to each such quotation (and wish to spare the reader the clutter), so I have decided to invoke the following blanket caveat:

WARNING: The editor makes no guarantee that any quotation with no citation was ever expressed by the author indicated. The author is listed not in duty to tradition, but as the starting point for future research.

I ask that any reader that knows the original source for any mystery quotation share the information with me.

© 1999 by MonkeyPants Press, an imprint of Bonobo Books, a division of Consolidated Trout, Ltd.
Last update: 03-July-2015
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