Paddy Blake's Echo; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 56.
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
“Redemption is never where you expect to find it.”
Source: Fire and Ice
“If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.”
This is attributed to Lincoln in the 1960 film adaptation of Pollyanna. In reality, it was fabricated by screenwriter and director David Swift, who had to have thousands of lockets bearing the false inscription recalled after Disney began selling them at Disneyland.
Misattributed
“Search not to find what lies too deeply hid,
Nor to know things, whose knowledge is forbid.”
Of Prudence, line 231.
“The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.”
Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book III, On Consumption, Chapter IV, p. 399 (See also:Say's Law, Michał Kalecki, John Maynard Keynes)
“The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias.”
Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 113
1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)
Context: We may be asked, I say, why we want it. I will tell you why we want it. We want it because it is our right, first of all. No class of men can, without insulting their own nature, be content with any deprivation of their rights. We want it again, as a means for educating our race. Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation. By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures; you declare before the world that we are unfit to exercise the elective franchise, and by this means lead us to undervalue ourselves, to put a low estimate upon ourselves, and to feel that we have no possibilities like other men. Again, I want the elective franchise, for one, as a colored man, because ours is a peculiar government, based upon a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage.
