Real and Imaginary Quotations

On June 3rd there was an article at LinkedInPulse by Patricia Fripp about How to Use Quotes in Public Speaking. She suggested that you get them from people in your life, or the audience you are addressing.

One of my personal favorites is my older brother’s first complete sentence:

“It has to be a certain way.” - Harry K. Garber

Harry wrote an article in the Encyclopedia of Chemistry titled What a Crime Lab Does, It Does with Chemistry. If you Google his name, you’ll find references to court cases like People vs Carreira where he’s the guy at the New York State Police lab who signed a certificate for the simulator solution (used to calibrate a Breathalyser for seeing if people were intoxicated while driving).  

You also could quote the famous, if you check that they really said what they were claimed to have said. In October 2015 comedian John Oliver created a web site called Definitely Real Quotes that generates plausible quotes displayed along with a picture of either himself or one of the following dozen famous people:

Aristotle
Winston Churchill
Confucius
Marie Curie
Amelia Earhart
Albert Einstein
Ben Franklin
Gandhi
Thomas Jefferson
Karl Marx
Theodore Roosevelt
Shakespeare

When I tried it, I got an image of Churchill holding up the famous World War II V-for Victory two-fingers and the quote shown above. Another one that came up was:

“I am objectively great at f**king. The best. 
 - Benjamin Franklin”

But that sounds more like one of Donald Trump’s recent tweets.

Earlier this month there was a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon that began by claiming:

“You can get people to believe anything just by lying about who said it.”

The image of Winston Churchill came from Wikimedia Commons.