On 4/23/2014 4:23 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:19 PM, LizR <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase "billions and billions" but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like "play it again, Sam" and "beam me up, Scotty!") Oops, sorry for stepping on your toes :) I didn't know that "beam me up, Scotty!" was also a misquote (!) I will have to agree with John Lydon: "the written word is a lie!"
It's not unusual for a famous author to have said something which later gets slightly changed in a way that makes it even more memorable. Churchill said, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat"; a nice example of parallelism blood->tears, toil->sweat. But it is now commonly quoted as "blood, sweat, and tears"; all bodily fluids. I liked to quote Daniel Dennett from his book "Elbow Room": "You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough." The trouble was he never wrote exactly that although he expressed the thought in slightly less succinct terms several times. But I had a solution. I emailed Dennett and asked him to use the phrase as I had quoted it - and he did in his reply. So now I can quote it and cite "private communication". :-)
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