“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Draft manuscript (c.1881), quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), p. 724 http://books.google.com/books?id=2UYLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA724#v=onepage&q&f=false <br class="br">Variant: Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer
Re: RFC: Lisp/Scheme with less parentheses through Python-like significant indentation? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/308ecb00b29198ba (Usenet article). <br class="br">Usenet articles, Miscellaneous
“History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.”
Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Cryoburn (2010), Chapter 13 (p. 257)
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)
Context: But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!" To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor
Source: 1990, Gary Groth interview
“If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.”
Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician
Edmund Burke, as quoted in Lacon in Council (1865) by John Frederick Boyes, p. 124
Misattributed
Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada
Analysis of why the big multi-national recording companys did not embrace downloading of songs legally on the Internet for many years. thestrippodcast.com (September 9, 2006)
2007, 2008
