Viral Quotes Twain Never Said

(and you can quote me on that!)

The Internet is awash in bogus quotations and Mark Twain is a favorite “source.”

Here’s one that’s all over Facebook, and the first time I read it was early in the morning, spoiling an excellent cup of fresh-brewed coffee: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

My warning bells went off immediately because the whole thing sounded too contemporary, especially “putting us on.” Not that Twain couldn’t be scathing about politicians. In A Tramp Abroad he wrote, “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.”

I know the Gilded Age well, having read James, Howells, Wharton, Twain and other novelists of that period extensively. I also researched it for a few years to write my own Gilded Age novel, Rosedale in Love: The House of Mirth Revisited.

The quote above doesn’t  show up anywhere as legitimately Twain’s, but it is definitely viral.

Then there’s this beauty: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

Twain never said it, and it leads the list of the ten most famous bogus Twain quotes. Why would anyone with an ear for the English language think this could be by Mark Twain? It has no wit, no style, no soul. It’s all about mechanics and could have been written by a team putting together an instruction manual.

The Web is flooded with sites where Twain supposedly gives this banal advice, and because Twain supposedly said it, that means wow, it’s important, take note! Twain is also often picked as the avatar of what Oscar Wilde called “more than usually revolting sentimentality,” like this classic: “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Could anyone who’s read Twain or even read about Twain possibly think he’d say something so smarmy? It’s as incongruously Twain’s as this other quotation that’s run amok across the Internet, spread by people eager to associate any thought at all with some distinguished American author, preferably dead: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Yes, unbeknownst to most Twain scholars and fans, the great satirist really wanted to write greeting cards….

The maudlin violets quote has been been sadly mis-attributed to Twain for decades with the help of the Dear Abby advice column. More recently, it got the imprimatur on NPR of self-improvement guru Dr. Wayne W. Dyer (W for Wikiquote?).

You’d think that someone looked up to for enlightenment by tens of millions of people might want to get his facts straight. All he’d have to do was consult Google to see the quote shows up as problematic.

So if you want to check a Twain quote yourself, it’s very easy.  One resource is Snopes, which has its own Twain page.   And there’s Barbara Schmidt’s web site TwainQuotes.com where you get the real man, not a fake reeking of  Victorian sentimentality or bogus can-do spirit.

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres and has been teaching writing on and off since 1975, most recently at Michigan State University. He mentors, coaches, and edits writers at writewithoutborders.com.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay