Did Mark Twain say: “Never argue with idiots. You will sink to their level, where they will crush you with their experience”?

A very popular warning on the Internet against communicating with stupid people, which is attributed to the American writer. We decided to check if he said anything like that.

This phrase, authored by Twain, appears on numerous websites with selections quotes And jokes. Her use in their works modern authors, also with reference to an American writer. Posted by users social networks and blogs on "Zene"and in LJ, discussed on service portals questions And answers. Eksmo even published collection Mark Twain's sayings, entitled this phrase. It is noteworthy that expression about the pointlessness of communicating with idiots is very popular and in the English-speaking segment of the Internet.

Mark Twain really had a wit, and many of his quotes eventually became aphorisms. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that he could say something like that. However, we were unable to find a similar phrase in any of the works of the American writer. It is not found in other written sources written by Twain, for example, letters or diaries.

Independent researcher Barbara Schmidt created the website Twain Quotes, where I collected a large collection of aphoristic sayings by this writer, as well as materials about him. Mark Twain House Museum in Connecticut recommends this source, so, apparently, this site can indeed be considered an authoritative and voluminous collection of Twain quotes. We checked the keywords from the quote being checked: “argue" (English - argue), "idiot" (English - idiot) and "experience"(English - experience) - according to the alphabetical index on the site and did not find anything even remotely reminiscent of this phrase.

We checked the same keywords on the resource Mark Twain Project Online, where a large digitized archive of texts written by this writer is collected. And we also could not find anything similar to the statement attributed to him about arguing with idiots.

Matt Seibold, an associate professor of American literature at Elmira College (USA) and a fellow at the Mark Twain Research Center, researched the history of this quote and came to conclusionthat the writer never said anything like that. He was able to find the probable original source of the aphorism - an interview with a Hollywood actor Yul Brynner 1956 (Mark Twain died in 1910). When asked what the best advice he ever received, the artist quoted his friend, the French poet and artist Jean Cocteau: “Never deal with idiots on their level, because if you are an intelligent person, you will try to get along with them on their level - and on their level they will always get the better of you.” However, Seybold notes, there is no evidence that Cocteau ever actually said anything like that, and Brynner himself in other situations more than once expressed various odious thoughts and attributed them to Cocteau. So, according to the researcher, there is a possibility that the actor simply used the reputation of his famous friend to bolster his own opinion.

By data The Quote Investigator project, whose authors check the correctness of the attribution of quotes, this phrase has appeared more than once in subsequent decades in various sources - mostly either with Cocteau’s authorship indicated, or completely anonymously. Also, its wording has undergone noticeable changes, although the meaning remains the same.

Seybold, who studied the archives of American newspapers of the last century, discovered, that in 1998 the quote in its familiar version appeared in several publications: the Atlanta Constitution, Daily Oklahoman, Elmira Star-Gazette, Kansas City Star, Longview News-Journal and Moline Dispatch. The journalists who used it did not indicate the specific author of the phrase, sometimes publishing it anonymously, sometimes referring to an unknown newspaper reader. In the same year, it appears in a medical journal published in Colorado in an article by a reputable neurosurgeon Scott Weingarten, who placed the statement in a list of “rules” about how to achieve your goals.

In 2009, Twitter user @mwalkercreative posted tweet: “Never argue with idiots. He will beat you with his experience, and people around you may not notice the difference between you,” and attributed the quote to Mark Twain. Neither The Quote Investigator nor Matt Seybold could find any earlier publications in which the phrase warning not to argue with idiots about their experience was attributed to an American writer. The second part of the phrase is also often attributed to Twain in the formulation "Never argue with a fool, the audience may not notice the difference" and also to him doesn't belong. Here the user mixed both quotes together.

So there is no reason to believe that Mark Twain ever said anything like that. This phrase does not appear in any of his works, or in other written sources written by the writer. The first discovered case of attribution of similar words to him is a message on Twitter published in 2009, that is, almost 100 years after the death of Mark Twain. Obviously, if there had been at least some evidence that he was the author of this phrase, they would have started to attribute it to the writer much earlier. Most likely, the original source of the aphorism was an interview with actor Yul Brynner, who, in turn, attributed the statement to the poet Jean Cocteau. And only then the quote was modified until it took the form in which we know it now, and at some point it was mistakenly attributed to Twain.

Cover photo: Samuel Langhorne Clemens by Albert Bigelow Paine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Incorrect quote attribution

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