When I was a boy living in Munich, my mother used to tell me, “Albert, don’t ever claim to have said or done something that you did not.”
Or it was something to that effect. I have never been too good at remembering the exact wording of quotes or who said them. Maybe it wasn’t my mother who said that at all. Maybe it was Kant.
Anyway, on to my point. It would appear that many of you, including even the arbiters of quotation repositories, have much the same problem as I do when it comes to accurate attributions. That’s why I decided to reanimate some molecules with my consciousness some 55 years after my death to let you all know that a number of the things some of you keep saying I said…well, I didn’t say them.
For instance, I am often quoted as saying something similar to, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” This is also sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, the American writer after whom, I do admit, I modeled my hairstyle and mustache after for much of my life.
I can’t speak for Mr. Twain, an accomplished writer and scholar, but I know that I was pretty thankful for my education. I did a lot of science, you see. I won a Nobel Prize even for some stuff about matter and energy that I won’t bore you with. I probably couldn’t have done that without at least some schooling.
Another quote many seem to believe I said was some such about bees and how, if they all die, we’ll probably die with them because of pollination or some such. For all I know, that may be true. But I didn’t say it. I hardly ever talked about bees at all. And if I did mention a bee, it was usually in the context of me screaming for someone to get it the hell out of my office.
They sting, you understand. And honestly, I was never much one for zoology or botany. I spent most of my time thinking about atoms and the speed of light and so on. Not to bore you with the details.
Yet another one I saw in an e-mail a few years ago was, “Evil is the absence of God.” That’s pretty punchy, but two things make it pretty clear I didn’t say it. One: I looked it up, and I did actually say at one time that I don’t believe in a God that punishes evil. I kind of remember saying that. And two, I don’t know how to use e-mail.
Plus, now that I have been dead for a while, I know for a fact that when God goes out for an ice cream cone or some smokes, the rest of us can usually hold down the fort until he gets back.
It’s curious that I so often am cited as the speaker of the quote above as well as one calling astrology a science containing an “illuminating body of knowledge.”
I did go to a fortune teller one time, just for the fun of it, and while she did somehow accurately predict that I would play a pivotal role in discovering the existence of photons, she never stated a hypothesis or did any experimentation to speak of, let alone replication or retesting. She just looked at my hand for a while and told me her findings in words rather than a peer-reviewed paper. That’s anything but scientific, if you ask me.
I have a handful of additional quotes that I would dispute, but I’m looking at some of the sites on your modern Internet and am not only failing to see the quotes I have mentioned taken down, I am, in fact, seeing even more inaccurate quotations going up under my name.
And the crazy thing is I spent much of my life trying to get people to write things I said down. I don’t think I’m bragging when I say I was pretty darn hilarious. Just to give you an example, I was telling colleagues to speak to my hand decades before it became such a popularly used phrase! Why doesn’t that get credited to me, I ask?
But I should stop. This is clearly not working. And you know what Benjamin Franklin said about trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
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