I have come to the conclusion that the following 10 individuals are credited with 80% of the quotations on the Internet:*
1. Winston Churchill
2. Mark Twain
3. Shakespeare
4. Gandhi
5. Steve Jobs
6. Warren Buffett
7. Oscar Wilde
8. Peter Drucker
9. Albert Einstein
10. Abraham Lincoln
I don't question the intellectual credentials of any of the above. But they couldn't possibly have said all of those clever things, could they? All it takes is one person to misattribute something, out of laziness or carelessness, and Mark Twain is eternally credited with another quote.
Occasionally I try to think of something clever to say. Thus far, nothing I've said has caught on to become part of the popular parlance. So I'd like to try again, this time sharing the credit.
"Some people are always looking for others' mistakes that they can criticize, like a dog sniffing the ground for a place to pee."
--Albert Einstein
Let's see how that goes.
*The following appear to have fallen out of fashion and no longer get much attribution, even though they were all eminently quotable: Benjamin Franklin, George Patton, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George Burns, John Wooden, Jack Welch, Henry David Thoreau, Socrates, Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Edison.
