Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)
“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
"Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty." — Charles Simmons, Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (1852), p. 20: "Accuracy"
Misattributed
“Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.”
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
A. N. Wilson (1950) English writer
A. N. Wilson, as quoted in The Guardian (30 September 1989); also in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 6.
“Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it.”
Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician
Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 7, p. 125
Context: Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.
“And it is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”
Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States
Letter to Washington, 11 November 1794
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer
This is not a quote by Kerouac. It's a quote by CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt who used to present a TV news segment called 'On the Road' (which is probably how the confusion arose). This particular statement by Kuralt was made in May 1996 to students of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19960527&id=yf8yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yQcGAAAAIBAJ&pg=3106,5606314
Misattributed
“There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.”
Frank Ocean (1987) American musician
GQ, November 20, 2012 http://www.gq.com/story/frank-ocean-interview-gq-december-2012
Bush, Stephen F., Keynote Speech, First IEEE International Conference on Communications 2012 Workshop on Telecommunications: From Research to Standards July 18, 2012.
