Chamblee54

Seven Brilliant Quotes was in my September archives, waiting to be reposted. 7BQ was originally posted in 2013, a simpler time. It was a personal milestone in the nasty business of quote debunking.
Facebook was suffering the revenge of the BrainyQuote. Tasteful bits of commodity wisdom, illustrated by pictures of splendid sunsets, were the rage. So, so many of them were not worth the pixels they populated. While it is not anyone’s fault to be posthumously misquoted, all seven quotees are men. 7BQ, the post, was an opportunity to attack seven cookie monsters in one sitting.
No good deed goes unpunished. A paragraph in 2013 says: “This type of research can be frustrating. Being inspired by beautiful words can give you strength and purpose. It can also make you feel foolish, when the lovely words are revealed to be lies. Being a cynic gets lonely. Children of all ages don’t like to be told that there is no Santa Claus.”
The next quote in the 2013 post was from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is one of two quotes than can be verified. There is a record of most things Dr. King said in public. Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a google search away. There is no need to make anything up.
Dr. King gave a speech at Western Michigan University on December 18, 1963. The second section of the speech is “Call for action.” “The world in which we live is geographically one. Now we are challenged to make it one in terms of brotherhood. Now through our ethical and moral commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools. This is the great challenge of the hour. This is true of individuals. It is true of nations. No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone.”
7BQ was a meme. In the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, one thing to do is reduce this graphic nuisance to a haiku. risk suffer silence · myself weakest point must learn · forgive easy win
In addition to Dr. King, the other verified quote was from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Certainly Dr. King knew about “must learn,” while MK Gandhi was familiar with forgiveness. As for the fakes …
Open Source Shakespeare shows that risk does not appear in anything “Shakespeare” wrote. Likewise, “Napoleon” did not suffer silence, or whatever the French version of that is. Clumsy translations are a another problem with quote mongering.
There is little doubt that “Einstein” thought about “myself.” Abraham Lincoln fought a war over the “weakest point.” As for Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam … “Indian scientist and engineer; 11th President of India” … who knows what he said? The quote used is not on his wikiquotes page.