Truth is Everything

Okay, let's see. Here it is. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists. Okay, so that was, uh, it was a quote I used in my Bible commentary. Truth is everything. So I was simply interested because I, if I'm putting this quote into my the Bible commentary, then I need to give it the proper attribution. I'm a very big stickler on that. I am the opposite of Claudine Gay. I am fanatical about not plagiarizing for moral reasons, not even legal reasons. So I have to find out the source of the quote. So fine, if Thomas Friedman, whom I don't particularly care for, is the source, so what? It's a good quote. I'll use it. I can't use it without attributing it to the author of the quote. So I simply did a search on the New York Times archives, which you would think Goodreads and LinkedIn and all these others would do if they're giving quotes, right? Like, where did he say it? Well, I found it. And you know what he said? As someone much smarter than I once said— and then he gives the quote. It is not from Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman never claimed it was from Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman himself said it was from somebody else. We don't know who it was from. This, this is a very disturbing thing. Very, very disturbing that a, a quotation site does not look up the source of the quotation. What the hell are they there for? It's the one thing they do And they don't do it well. Truth. But this Friedman quote is such a perfect example. He himself said, I am not the source of this quote. But everywhere he is given as the source of the quote.