Posted by Eugene Volokh:
"History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes":
A while back, I got several messages from readers attributing this
quote to Mark Twain. I'm always skeptical of such attributions, since
Twain -- plus a few other people, such as Winston Churchill, Dorothy
Parker, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin
Disraeli, and H.L. Mencken -- seem to be magnets for loose quotations.
If you're not sure of the source, credit Twain, and that'll be
plausible enough. So I asked the indispensable UCLA Law School
research library to track it down. (Yes, I can legitimately do that,
since I plan on using the quote in my law review article.)
Here's what seems to be the scoop, courtesy of Jenny Lentz: The quote
has indeed been often attributed to Mark Twain, but there doesn't seem
to be much proof that he indeed said it. The most detailed source she
could find was this note in an article by Lawrence P. Wilkins in 28
Indiana Law Review 135 (1995):
[The quote was a]ttributed [to mark Twain] by Allen D. Boyer in
Activist Shareholders, Corporate Directors, and Institutional
Investment: Some Lessons from the Robber Barons, 50 WASH. & LEE L.
REV. 977, 977 (1993), who saw the attribution in ROBERT SOBEL,
PANIC ON WALL STREET 431 (1988). Professor Sobel saw the
attribution some time ago in an editorial column in the New York
Times, the author of which he cannot recall. He has consulted with
several Twain scholars across the country, and all agree that the
quotation sounds very much like something Twain would say, but none
seems able to find the actual words in Twain's papers. Telephone
conversations with Allen D. Boyer and Robert Sobel, March 3, 1995
and March 7, 1995. It is somewhat ironic that this quotation cannot
be definitively traced to Twain, whose energies were spent in great
measure to protect his rights of authorship. . . .
In any case, I can still easily use the quote, just giving it as
"Attributed to Mark Twain." But it's worth noting that there's some
uncertainty about it. If anyone can resolve this uncertainty by a
specific pointer to a written work by Twain -- and not just by a
pointer to someone who has attributed the quote to Twain -- please let
me know.
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