Who Said What?

 

I watched a movie, The Big Short (2015), which presented the Hollywood version of the subprime meltdown in 2007 that arguably triggered The Great Recession.   It was a very well-done and engaging film with a star-studded cast that included:  Steve Carell (Mark Baum), Christian Bale (Michael Burry), Ryan Gosling (Jared Vennett), and Brad Pitt (Ben Rickert).  All the characters portrayed by these stars were based on real people but only Christian Bale’s character, Michael Burry, used the character’s real name.  The movie is fast paced, gripping and each of these actors does a great job. 

There was a Mark Twain quote at the beginning of the movie: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”  It resonated with me, as quotes are prone to do.  I reversed the video, hit stop and took a photo of it.  It was a very cool quote. 

I did an internet search to find a graphic for the inevitable bloggy bit I was going to write about this.  There were graphics of the quote but there were articles, as well, that state that Mark Twain never said this.  This is the problems with quotes found on the internet… anything found on the internet.  How can we be sure the luminary said what the beautiful graphics on quotation websites attribute them as saying?  In my case, I simply trust the websites which is a bit risky.  Case in point, in my New Year's Day 2025 post, I wanted to include a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  It is beautiful and direct.  The problem is that it has never been verified he ever wrote or said this.  But dang if Albert Einstein doesn’t give the good quote more gravity and force then say Rita Mae Brown who actually first uttered the phrase.  Rita Mae who?  Get the idea?  Rita Mae Brown is a civil rights, feminist, and LGBT activist and writer.  She has a reputation but nowhere near that of Einstein’s.

The New Republic addressed the same issue in a December 29, 2015 article by Alex Shephard, “’It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble,’ which must be why The Big Short opens with a fake Mark Twain quote.”  The article claims that the closest that Mark Twain ever came to this was, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”  It also attributes a different version of the quote to one Josh Billings (1818-1885), a humorist and lecturer.  The New Republic article noted that the quote used by Michael Lewis in his book, on which the movie is based, is from Leo Tolstoy in a 1897 essay, “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” 

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

The New Republic article states that the Tolstoy quote is good but cumbersome to the one falsely attributed to Mark Twain. 

So why the fake quote?  Movies need something move things along and quotes need to be  pithy.  The Tolstoy quote has 55 words, the questionable Twain quote has 21.  Who’s going to read the longer more complex quote that takes longer to read and digest than the shorter folksier easier to digest fake Twain quote.  A post on reddit noted, “This is done to show that people will make things up and you will believe them. Just as the big banks and ratings agencies did before the Financial Crisis of 2008.”  This sounds like as good a theory as any. 

Of course there is my favorite quote of all time…