Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer
2017 <br class="br">Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother
“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”
— Mark Twain, book The Innocents Abroad
Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 61.
Context: The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
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Mark Twain637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes
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“Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”
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Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises où l'on échoue.
Pt. 1, Ch. 5
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“I swear the sparrows called us ten kinds of idiot when we did it.”
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“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
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This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:
: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed
“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer
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