Bogus Quotations That Live Forever

Gary North - February 07, 2015

I begin with a quotation that is attributed to H. L. Mencken. It is irresistible for libertarians.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

It is all over the Web.

What is not all over the Web is a footnote. Where did he write this?

I did a long search. I did find this on a site titled Wikiquote. It's faked. It was deliberately faked. It appears in a list of quotations, which are valid. Then, at the end of the list -- each of which has a chapter designated -- is the quotation on government. No chapter is listed. So, I went to two online editions of the original book. The quotation is not there. I modified the entry -- a great advantage of Wiki software.

Maybe Mencken did write the famous words on government. They surely sound like something he would say. But he did not write these words where a detailed Wikiquote article said he did. My point is this: Verify. Don't trust. When you have the original source in front of you, then offer the quotation. But supply the footnote.

I am happy to report that within 20 minutes of my posting, someone removed the suspect quotation and my comment. The Wiki strategy works most of the time. Errors get corrected.

Other examples:

Lenin never wrote this: "Peace, land, and bread." Yet respectable textbooks attribute this to him, and argue that it was this slogan that enabled the Bolsheviks to win the hearts of the Russian peasants.

Marie Antoinette never said this: "Let them eat cake."

Alexander Tytler never wrote this:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

The greenback fiat money movement has rested almost entirely on bogus quotations for a century. I survey lots of them here: //www.garynorth.com/public/department142.cfm.

Mencken was the author of a wildly successful hoax. It was an essay on the origin of the bathtub. It got picked up by the press, and he could never stop its spread, although he tried. There is a Wikipedia entry on this incident.

On December 28, 1917, an article titled "A Neglected Anniversary" by H. L. Mencken was published in the New York Evening Mail. It claimed that the bathtub had been introduced into the United States as recently as 1842, the first ones having been made of mahogany lined with lead. The article went on to describe how the introduction of the bathtub was initially greatly discussed and opposed until President Millard Fillmore had a bathtub installed in the White House in 1850, making the invention more broadly acceptable.

In 1949 Mencken wrote:

The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity ... Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.

If a quote seems too juicy to be true, verify it. Use Snopes as an initial check.