I’ve had the following quote on my blog for a while:
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt” Abraham Lincoln
It was pointed out to me that the attribution of that quote should have been to Mark Twain, not Abraham Lincoln. I started wondering if that could be true. I certainly did not want to propagate a misquote. Even after doing some searching on the web, I still was not able to determine the answer to my satisfaction. Bartleby, where I usually go to check quotes, did not have the quote at all. A number of sites attribute the quote to Lincoln, and just as many attribute the quote to Mark Twain. Still other sites attribute to someone else altogether. I was not able to find any reliable citations on any site. Even Ask Yahoo came up empty.
The quote is clearly derived from a much earlier quote found in Proverbs 17:28 in the Míshlê Shlomoh in the Tanakh.
A few randomly selected sites showing one or the other:
Alas, we’ll have to make do enjoying the quote without proper attribution.
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