A statement about the dangers of anger attributed to an American writer has been widely circulated on the Internet. We decided to check if he wrote anything similar.

This phrase, indicating the authorship of Mark Twain, can be found on websites with selections quotes famous personalities and aphorisms. Social media users share it (“VKontakte", "Classmates", Facebook*, Instagram*, TikTok) and blogging platforms (“Peekaboo", "Zen", LiveJournal, LiveInternet, "Habr"). Often a statement signed by Twain publish and on educational And entertaining portals. Modern authors specializing in motivational literature include quotes in their books - for example, “77 truths, or a healthy way of thinking"Maxim Markov or "Lifehacks of resilient people. 50 ways to be strong» John Lees.

Mark Twain was famous for his wit, so many of his quotes have become common aphorisms - it’s easy to believe that he could write something in the style of the phrase being analyzed. However, “Verified” was unable to find it in any of the writer’s works. It is also not in the digitized archive. Mark Twain Projects Online, collected with the support of the University of California at Berkeley (USA), nor in recommended Mark Twain House Museum in Connecticut Base Twain Quotes, which includes texts written by Mark Twain or dedicated to the writer. In electronic Mark Twain archive, collected by the University of Virginia Library (USA), also found nothing similar. The phrase was not included in the large collection of quotes from the writer “Mark Twain at your fingertips» edited by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, who had the opportunity to study Twain's original works through her friendship with his daughter.

Project Quote Investigator indicates the earliest use of the quotation in a wording close to the one being analyzed: in May 1955, several newspapers in California published it on the same day. However, journalists did not attribute the statement to Mark Twain. The writer himself died 45 years earlier, and the editors of the project, like “Verified,” were unable to find earlier cases of using the quotation in a similar formulation with or without indicating Twain’s authorship. Quote Investigator cites several more recent uses of this statement in various media, but until the 2000s, no one identified the writer as its author.

The first case of attribution of a quote to an American writer, which Verified was able to find, is fast dated July 31, 2006, published in the Google Groups service by a user with the nickname Gayathri Elan. There is no indication in the post where exactly the quote came from. Probably, the author of the publication saw this phrase on the Internet, and then confused the author, because, as mentioned above, some of Twain’s quotes are indeed very aphoristic and therefore popular even among those who have not read his works. This is also why Mark Twain is often credited with saying famous phrases that he never said or wrote. For example, “Verified” has already parsed quotes “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they are being fooled.", "If anything depended on the elections, we would not be allowed to participate in them" And "There is nothing easier than quitting smoking! I've done this hundreds of times" Twain is often cited as their author, but he had nothing to do with any of them.

The very idea that negative emotions harm more the one who experiences them than the object to which they are directed is not new at all and is found in different formulations. For example, the same portal Quote Investigator wrote about the quote “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die,” which is also often mistakenly attributed to famous personalities. Turkey has proverb about how sour vinegar harms its jar (meaning that a person with a bad character actually suffers more than those around him).

Thus, there is no evidence that Mark Twain ever wrote or uttered a phrase that compares anger to acid. In this formulation, it was circulated in the middle of the last century in the American media, however, without attribution. Apparently, Internet users mistakenly attributed it to Twain only in the mid-2000s, almost a century after the writer’s death.

Cover photo: Ernest Herbert Mills, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.