We haven’t played this in a while. I pick quotes from my library, give you 4 choices and you guess who said it. Answers are below. Sorry you have to scroll down each time. I just don’t know how else to do it so you don’t see the answer. Easiest if you write your answers down and then look. The quotes are from my own library (well, almost always), which is for personal reasons (apparentlly) important to me. And I wouldn't know the answers either except that I read them. And apologies for my endless formatting issues.
1. “I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise to ever occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.”
A. Ralph Waldo Emerson B. David Henry Thoreau
C. Edgar Allan Poe D. M. L. King, Jr.
2. “[I]f God was to exist and had a chance to meet him, what would you ask him? . . . I would like to ask however did he think of anything as complicated as M-Theory in eleven dimensions.”
A. Albert Einstein B. Richard Feynman C. Stephen Hawking
D. Bill Belichick
3. “As to the divination which takes place in sleep, and is said to be based on dreams, we cannot lightly either dismiss it with contempt or give it implicit confident. The fact that all persons, or many, suppose dreams to possess a special significance, tends to inspire us with belief in it [such divination], as founded on the testimony of experience; and indeed that divination in dreams should, as regards some subjects, be genuine, is not incredible, for it has a show of reason; from which one might form a like opinion also respecting all other dreams. Yet the fact of our seeing no probable cause to account for such divination tends to inspire us with distrust. For, in addition to its further unreasonableness, it is absurd to combine the idea that the sender of such dreams should be God with the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons.”
A. Aristotle B. Martin Luther C. Martin Luther King, Jr.
D. Sigmund Freud
4. “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, whatever the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.”
A. Pericles B. Shakespeare C. Winston Churchill
D. Prince Charles
5. “Our captain, who is about 25 years of age, is the son of my most intimate friend. But whether the father is dead or living, I have not dared to ask. Mrs. H. is the sister of a priest name Elliot, a man of sound sense, and much esteemed. He came to establish himself at Fairfield, with is two sisters, while I was there. We were much attached Mrs. H. is the youngest of these two sisters. She would be greatly astonished were I to recount to her all the little anecdotes I know of herself and her family But I shall refrain from it.”
A. Richard Burton (actor) B. Richard Burton (explorer)
C. George Washington D. Aaron Burr
6. “I had been in the library on the first floor, and had just turned out the lights and gone upstairs with Mrs. ______ to retire. I had reached the upper floor and undressed, but had not yet retired. I heard a crash downstairs as if something had been thrown against the front door. It was followed immediately by an explosion which blew in the front of the house. The door against which it was thrown leads into the library in which we had been sitting, and the part of the house blown in was in front of the library. The police and other agents who hurried to the residence to make an investigation found in the street in front of the house the limbs of a man who had been blown to pieces by the bomb. No papers were found and no evidence has yet been uncovered to indicate his identity, and it is not yet known whether the limbs were those of the person who threw the bomb or of a passerby. I hope sincerely that they were not portions of the body of some innocent person passing the house. No one inside the house was injured by the explosion. It cracked the upper part of the first story of the house, blew in the front of the lower floor, broke windows, and knocked pictures from the walls. The damage done was chiefly downstairs.”
A. Theodore Geisl (Dr. Seuss)
B. A. Mitchell Palmer (of the Palmer raids)
C. G. Gordon Liddy (of Watergate fame)
D. Walter Winchell (famous journalist)
7. “I love women. An awful lot of women have been kind and generous and magnificent company. I spent some time in [Salt Lake City] with the girls along Commercial Street. They were, let’s say, named for the street. We got along well.”
A. Bob Dylan B. Jack Dempsey C. Warren Harding
D. B. B. King
8. “I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats, and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
A. Adolf Hitler B. Nelson Mandela C. Fidel Castro
D. Josef Stalin
9. “Such an astounding lack of talent was never before united to such pretentiousness.”
A. Tchaikovsky on Richard Strauss.
B. Winston Churchill on Dwight Eisenhower.
C. Beethoven on Bach.
D. Mamie Eisenhower on Richard Nixon.
10. “I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could absorb the short lifetime granted to us. Consequently I saw myself in the position of Buridan’s ass, which was unable to decide upon any specific bundle of hay.”
A. Jean Buridan
B. Calvin Coolidge
C. Alan Turing
D. Albert Einstein
ANSWERS
1. “I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise to ever occupy any very high place in the human family. . . .”
I love quotes where some famous person has written something which so appalls modern people that if modern pols and others so easily outraged knew he/she said it – they’d become a historical persona non grata to many. Both Emerson and Thoreau became noted abolitionists. MLK, Jr., of course, a famous civil rights figure. But, Poe, like it seems every past famous person, is being vetted for racism. Well, his family did own slaves and his portrayal of blacks seemed racist – pretty consistent for the times. But, the answer, is not Poe, but Emerson, A, who, living in the 19th century, like Lincoln, said similarly racist things. In any event, this quote is from Emerson’s journal, years prior to his celebrated speech when he finally ceded to his wife’s wishes and joined the movement against slavery.
2. “[I]f God was to exist and had a chance to meet him, what would you ask him? . . . .”
I put this in because it just shows how stupid really smart people can be. Really, that’s what you would ask God, if you had one question? Not, how can we know the difference between right and wrong? What is your nature? Where did you come from? How did you know how do all that cool stuff? In retrospect was Eve a bad idea? Or Satan? Or karaoke? What are next week’s Powerball numbers? Etc.
You’ll be surprised to know that this was Bill Beli. . . kidding, kidding. I’d like to think that Stephen Hawking, C, in Brief Answers to Big Questions, was kidding too, but it doesn’t seem so. If there is a God, why would M-Theory*, if it is even right, be difficult for him (I know, or her)? If you assume a God both omnipotent and omniscient – well, doesn’t that answer the question in itself? By the way, Stephen Hawking may have been brilliant, but I read some of Brief Answers and it could have been written by Oprah or Tom Brady, for that matter. Not that there aren’t interesting musings there, but it is not earth-shaking stuff. He writes mundane answers to well visited questions like - Is there a God? No; How was the universe created? Spontaneously from nothing (well, that clears it up!), Are UFOs manned by space aliens? No. Yawwwwwn. Time travel? Maybe, he says. Will we survive on earth? Maybe again. Will we colonize space? He hopes so. Get the picture?
Hawkins didn’t dream up this theory; a scientist named Ed Witten did to make all the different string theory [also nonsense] more consistent.
3. “As to the divination which takes place in sleep, and is said to be based on dreams, we cannot lightly either dismiss it with contempt or give it implicit confident. The fact that all persons, or many, suppose dreams to possess a special significance. . . .”
The answer is Aristotle, C. I’ve wandered through Aristotle’s works from time to time. Only an insane person (or maybe an incredibly focused, dedicated and intelligent person who would appear insane to the rest of us) would try to read it straight through. What is remarkable is not that he was right much in the long run, but his curiosity, dedication, depth of thought, scope of learning and creativity. Not, alas, his eloquence, although maybe Greeks of his time thought he was. They didn’t have youtube cat videos to distract them. Well over 2000 years ago, he was writing about logic, physics and metaphysics, the heavens, creation and corruption, nature, memory, dreams, ethics, politics, the soul, rhetoric and poetry, etc., and he did it without Wikipedia and Google.
4. “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. . . .”
That could have been any of them (what I try to do here, obviously), but it was Winnie, C, the irascible, lovable, impossible and motivating Prime Minister who won the war for Britain, and then lost his job and then won it back. This quote is from his eulogy of his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, who seemed such a failure if judged alone by the famous appeasement at Munich. But, Churchill seems to me to be talking about himself too. Chamberlain would agree with him. They were both heirs of the same tradition of British stoicism. Chamberlain wrote shortly before he died – “So far as my personal reputation is concerned, I am not in the least disturbed about it. The letters which I am still receiving in such vast quantities so unanimously dwell on the same point, namely without Munich the war would have been lost and the Empire destroyed in 1938 ... I do not feel the opposite view ... has a chance of survival. Even if nothing further were to be published giving the true inside story of the past two years I should not fear the historian's verdict.” (Self, Neville Chamberlain). Frankly, I doubt it. Just my opinion, but it is quite possible the stoicism only ran skin deep and he was consumed with thinking about it. But, I could be wrong. I try to be stoic (sometimes), and there are some people who actually think I don’t let other people’s opinion bother me. I try not to and sometimes I succeed, at least relative to some others, but sometimes not so much. We are all human, social animals and I think everybody cares to some degree what others think of them.
5. “Our captain, who is about 25 years of age, is the son of my most intimate friend. But whether the father is dead or living, I have not dared to ask. Mrs. H. is the sister of a priest name Elliot, a man of sound sense, and much esteemed. He came to establish himself at Fairfield, with is two sisters, while I was there. We were much attached Mrs. H. is the youngest of these two sisters. She would be greatly astonished were I to recount to her all the little anecdotes I know of herself and her family But I shall refrain from it. . . .”
He’s not going to tell us who it was? Or ask his friend’s son if his father, his most intimate friend, is dead? Why? His evil reputation would lead one to believe he would be happy to do so. And, why wouldn’t ask after the health of his most intimate friend? Alas, Aaron Burr’s, D’s, memoirs are kind of boring, that being one of the more interesting comments. He was a fascinating person, and in my view, more honorable than famous contemporaries who blackened his name – Jefferson and Hamilton. At least he got revenge on Hamilton who wouldn’t say – sorry. But, his memoirs, covering a middle period in his life while he traveled about - yawn!
6. “I had been in the library on the first floor, and had just turned out the lights and gone upstairs with Mrs. ______ to retire. I had reached the upper floor and undressed, but had not yet retired. I heard a crash downstairs as if something had been thrown against the front door. It was followed immediately by an explosion which blew in the front of the house. . . .”
The answer is not Dr. Seuss, sadly, although that would have been really cool. It was the former U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, B. This was 1919, the days of anarchist bombings. His neighbor across the street was none other than FDR, then Asst. Sec’y of the Navy, and his wife, Eleanor. They were walking home after parking their car when the bomb went off and FDR joked to her that the bomb shell he had brought home from Europe must have fallen. But, as they got closer, they started to run. The streets were covered with debris, including human legs, with some flesh even making it all the way to their doorstep. Their young son was home and FDR, who was not yet crippled, ran up the stairs to find him. He was looking out the window in his pajamas. James later wrote that his father hugged him hard enough to almost break his ribs.
7. “I love women. An awful lot of women have been kind and generous and magnificent company. I spent some time in [Salt Lake City] with the girls along Commercial Street. They were, let’s say, named for the street. We got along well.”
That was the plain spoken Jack Dempsey, B. Roger Kahn’s A Flame of Pure Desire, is one of my favorite sport’s biographies.
8. “I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats, and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison. . . .”
Ummmm. . . they all spent time in prison. The answer is Castro, C. Toughest one.
9. “Such an astounding lack of talent was never before united to such pretentiousness.”
This was a fun one (for me, at least). You can easily imagine almost any historic figure speaking thus of a competitor. But, Beethoven loved Bach – called him a God of harmony. Though there were times that Eisenhower seemed ambivalent about his vice president, I have never read anything but that Mamie had a good relationship with Nixon. Maybe there’s something out there to the contrary, but her grandson married Nixon’s daughter, and they maintained a relationship to the end. As for Churchill, famous for his cutting wit, and Eisenhower, I’ve also read nothing indicating that there was anything but friendship between them, despite inevitable quarreling during the war. The answer was A, Tchaikovsky, speaking of Richard Strauss. Pyotr Ilyich was relatively jealous of other composers and liked to comment about them. Personally, I think Tchaikovsky was by far the greater of the two. And the one survey of modern listeners’ favorite classical composers I've read is in agreement. But, you know, it’s all good. A Strauss concert in Vienna was the first time I ever attended a professional classical music concert and his Also sprach Zarathustra (aka the theme to 2001, A Space Odyssey), a phenomenal work.
10. “I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could absorb the short lifetime granted to us. Consequently I saw myself in the position of Buridan’s ass, which was unable to decide upon any specific bundle of hay. . . .”
Buridan’s ass? How many people would recognize that expression today, or people under 50 anyway. Buridan was a 14th century expositor of Aristotle, who I think is the earliest known reciter of the story of the donkey who was placed halfway between a pile of hay and some water. It’s about free will and determinism, not to get into all that. Anyway, for some reason the story became associated with Buridan, though I’m not sure anyone knows why. Anyway, the answer isn’t Buridan, certainly not Coolidge, nor Turing, though he makes sense. It was Einstein, D.
And that’s another exciting adventure of – Who said it?
