Did Mark Twain say, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled”?

A phrase about fooling people, attributed to an American writer, has been widely circulated on the Internet. We decided to check if he said anything like that.

This quote with an indication of the authorship of Mark Twain you can meet on numerous websites With selections aphorisms and sayings of famous people. She is popular on social networks (for example, in “VKontakte"and in Twitter) and blogs (“Zene", "Habré", LiveJournal). There's a lot on the Internet pictures with a photograph of Twain and this statement. Sometimes it is even included in collections writer's quotes.

The works of the American writer are well studied and digitized. The largest portals where Twain’s texts are posted are the archive Mark Twain Projects Online, collected with the support of the University of California at Berkeley (USA), base Twain Quotes, which includes texts written by Mark Twain or dedicated to the writer, and electronic archive Mark Twain, collected by the University of Virginia Library (USA). In none of these “Verified” databases was it possible to find the phrase “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they are fooled” or a similar analogue.

The earliest case of attribution of this quote (in its English version - “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled”) to Mark Twain was found by Verified in Twitter — in a post by user @SaraRosinsky in 2011. This was a repost from @Joreth, but the original tweet was later deleted.

Our fellow fact checkers from Snopes, who also verified the authenticity of this quote, turned to Barbara Schmidt, an independent Twain scholar and creator of the Twain Quotes resource, for comment. She also found no evidence that the American writer had anything to do with the phrase.

I agree that Twain never said such a thing. Matt Seibold is an associate professor of American literature at Elmira College and a fellow at the Mark Twain Research Center. He calls himself "the world's leading expert on the crap that Mark Twain didn't say." In his article 2022, he analyzes the English versions of the quote about fooling people from the point of view of vocabulary and points out that some of the words used in the statement do not appear at all in Twain’s texts. In addition, Seybold cites a quote from the 1913 Dexter Dispatch newspaper, which could serve as the original source of the aphorism in question: “It is much easier to fool this class of people (socialists - Ed.) than to convince them of the truth.” And it did not belong to Twain at all (he had already died three years by that time), but to the editor-in-chief of the publication named Baldridge.

Nevertheless, Mark Twain had similar thoughts, although not in the same formulation. So, in "Chapters from my autobiography“He wrote: “How easy it is to make a person believe a lie and how difficult it is to later undo what has been done.” In the book "What is a person?" Twain wrote about the search for truth this way: "I have seen several completely sincere people who considered themselves [permanent] Seekers of Truth. They searched diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, deeply, with perfect honesty and well-calibrated judgments, until they believed that they had found the Truth without doubt or question. This is where the search ended. Man spent the rest of his life searching for a roof that would protect his Truth from the elements.”

Thus, there is no evidence that Mark Twain ever uttered or wrote the phrase being tested. It is not found either in his works or in other written sources written by the writer. At the same time, there are indeed similar thoughts in his works, although the wording differs significantly from the quote in question. Unlike many other completely fictitious quotes attributed to Twain, it is possible that whoever first published this phrase actually read the idea from the writer and then circulated the paraphrase in his own words. 

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

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