1. In the age of the Internet, all quotations should be suspect but aren’t.
2. All quotations get improved by repeated transmission.
3. Few quotations on Internet threads resemble, even remotely, their originals.
4. When in doubt, attribute a quotation, randomly, to one of the following: Aristotle, da Vinci, Lincoln, Bentham, Mill, Wilde, Churchill, Yeats, Russell, Einstein, or Gandhi. If it’s funny, attribute it to Mark Twain or Yogi Berra. Any such attribution will be widely believed.
5. When making such an attribution, don’t give the source because there isn’t one.
And finally, this, which I will leave unsourced because I am too lazy to look it up:
“You can’t believe most of what you read on the Internet.”
–Abraham Lincoln
For more pieces by Bob Shepherd on the topic of Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/
For more pieces on the teaching of literature and writing, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/teaching-literature-and-writing/
Bob Shepherd | Praxis 