quote – Terence Eden’s Blog

What's the source of Einstein's "citizen of the world" quip?

@edent — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:34:03 +0000

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Let's see if we can find it!

1929-12-04

The earliest I can find is in the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who published this snippet:

Is this likely to be true? What other evidence is there that Einstein was there and made those remarks?

1929-11-12

Flicking back a few weeks in the JTA archives is this evidence - "Sorbonne bestows degree on Einstein."

1929-11-09

There are also contemporary photos of the ceremony which are included in various press clippings.

Is there anything previous to 1929?

1922??

Alice Calaprice's Quotable Einstein has the quote but attributes it differently:

From an address to the French Philosophical Society at the Sorbonne, April 6, 1922. See also French press clipping, April 7, 1922, Einstein Archive 36-378; and Berliner Tageblatt, April 8, 1922, Einstein Archive 79-535

I wasn't able to find the French press clipping - but the German paper is available.

My German is rusty and that font is hard but I don't think it says anything similar to the above quote. I think the 1922 date is merely the confusion between two different visits to the Sorbonne - which is the same conclusion as Wikiquote editors came to

Contemporary reports

OK, so what other sources are there for the quote? The JTA says:

The local papers feature a summary of the brief address made by Prof. Albert Einstein […]

So I suppose they were just re-reporting what others had said. Let's take a look in some of those newspapers via Bibliothèque nationale de France who have an excellent archive of newspapers.

There's a rather detailed report from L'Œuvre - but that makes no mention of the anecdote.

Similarly, there are other interviews and contemporary commentary - but this remark goes unnoticed by all of them.

I read through several dozen French papers from November 1929 until early December. I couldn't find anything resembling the remark in any of them.

OK, what about the German press?

Again it is possible to search German newspapers for those specific dates - and there are plenty of contemporary reports.

Nothing about him being a Weltbürger that I could see.

Similarly, British newspapers don't make reference to the joke despite their endless coverage of him.

Google's shitty AI hallucinates the quote as appearing in The Saturday Evening Post.

While that issue does have an extensive interview with Einstein, there's nothing even vaguely similar to the sentiment about being a citizen of the world. Never trust an AI!

Is it likely?

Einstein is endlessly quotable - and had a good ear for a pithy turn of phrase. However, he was accompanied on this trip by the German Ambassador. Would it have been prudent for him to make such a politically charged joke in front of that audience?

Minced Oaths

Perhaps this is a mangled quotation? Einstein said something similar several years before the purported 1929 quote.

In Herman Bernstein's 1924 book "Celebrities of Our Time Interviews", there's the following quote:

That's much less pithy, but carries largely the same sentiment.

The original can be seen in the British Newspaper Archive of 1919

Dr. Einstein's Theory.

We publish to-day a translation of an article written for our readers by ALBERT EINSTEIN
[…] He adds that the different descriptions of him in England and Germany form an amusing example of relativity to the sentiments of the two countries. He is famous just now, and was described in our columns as a Swiss Jew, whereas in Germany he is called a German man of science. He suggests that were he suddenly to become a bête noire, the descriptions would be reversed, and he would be stigmatized here as a German man of science and in Germany as a Swiss Jew. We concede him his little jest.

However, do note that this is described as a translation. In his letter to Paul Ehrenfest on the 4th of December 1919, he says:

By the way, I myself participated in the cackling by writing a short article in the Times, in which I thanked our English colleagues, said a few things to characterize the theory, and at the end produced the following witticism: A simple application of the theory of relativity: today German newspapers are calling me a German man of science, the English, a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bete noire to the readerships, I should be a Swiss Jew for German newspapers and a German man of science for the English.'

See The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9 The Berlin Years. I cannot find the original letter, but I assume Princeton's transcribers and translators are accurate.

Either way, that's two reputable sources which have Einstein expressing something similar. Perhaps the joke was repeated and refined by him as the years wore on? Perhaps an eager journalist took a half-remembered quote and gave it new life? Perhaps.

Where next?

Well, dear reader, that's where you come in! I've exhausted all my research prowess. If you can find a transcript of his remarks, or a report older than the JTA's of the 4th of December 1929 where Einstein talks about being a "citizen of the world", please drop a comment in the box!

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

@edent — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:34:23 +0000

I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true.

There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.

You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.

You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.

There are vast archives of printed material to help you.

The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.

Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.

Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.

Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.

Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.

While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.

I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.

And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).

Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.

The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.

To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.

I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.

But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.

This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.

The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.

I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.

Stopping misinformation starts with you.

No, Oscar Wilde did not say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness"

@edent — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:34:25 +0000

Another day, another debunking!

I've seen this quote flying around social media for some time.

Everyone loves finding out that a famous quote has a twist and that the author isn't anonymous. It's the perfect piece of clickbait!

But the thing is… this quote is bunkum.

The easiest way to tell is to stick it into a search engine. You'll find lots of people confidently claiming it is by Wilde - but no actual sources. Try it now. Surely at some point someone would have pointed to the scene in a play, or some private correspondence, or a passage from a book, wouldn't they? But there's nothing. Just a lot of unsourced claims.

Wilde isn't an obscure writer. All of his work has been digitised and is easily searchable. As far as I can tell, this "quote" doesn't appear anywhere.

So who did say it? And who attributed it to Oscar Wilde?

The phrase "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" has a long history. In its modern form, it can be attributed to Charles Caleb Colton who published it in a book of aphorisms in 1820. That's 34 years before Oscar Wilde was born.

But what about "that mediocrity can pay to greatness"? The earliest example of that 2nd half comes from 1893, in "Notices of the proceedings at the meetings of the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain with abstracts of the discourses - Volume XIV". That was published in 1896.

Here it is in the essay "The Imaginative Faculty" by Sir Herbert Beerbohm.

Admittedly, that was published during Wilde's life. And, in 1892, Beerbohn produced and stared in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance. Nevertheless, the phrase isn't found in that play - nor in any of his earlier works that I can see.

In 1898, the phrase was also used by "Abbott" when memorialising the racist and misogynist hate-preacher "Brann":

It pops up again in 1918 with Georg Brandes writing "A great writer has said: Detraction is the only tribute, which mediocrity can pay to the great.".

The combining of the two phrases doesn't seem to appear online or in archived works until - as far as I can see - October 2nd 2012.

Using Twitter's date-based search I found a now-defunct lifestyle magazine with the full quote - albeit unattributed. A few days later, someone quotes a now-private account which attributes it to Wilde.

A year or so earlier, in 2011, a Juventus Football fan posted this proto-version of the phrase:

The Origin?

But, perhaps there is a little truth in the quote.

In 1882, Oscar Wilde gave a lecture - "The English Renaissance of Art" - in New York City. During which, he said:

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius

A version of which can be seen (in very low fidelity) in the New York Tribune, January 10th 1882:

A few months later, he signed an autograph with the slightly more pithy:

Satire is the homage which mediocrity pays to genius.

Sadly, it does not appear to have been an original bon mote.

Going back even further

A year before, in 1881, the Michigan Medical News published a column saying:

Perhaps Wilde was unlikely to be reading medical journals. But there are earlier publications

In 1872, a list of sayings was attributed to the American judge Frederick Grimke:

Even earlier is this entry from The Dublin Magazine from 1842:

That's a good decade before Oscar Wilde was born. It is possible that, as he was born and grew up in Dublin, the phrase was in common parlance then.

So what have we learned?

Everyone loves a cool quote. And people feel smart when they are told a "hidden truth" behind it. It's the same thing that lights up the brains of conspiracy theorists; there's a second meaning which the world doesn't know but has been revealed to you.

But this, it turns out, is not by Oscar Wilde. Both halves of the quote pre-dates him by several decades. The quote that Wilde did give is about satire, rather than imitation. And even that wasn't original.

But the Internet is a machine which mercilessly mingles quotes until a new meme was born.

"I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."

Did Dvorak Die "A Bitter Man"?

@edent — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 11:27:02 +0000

Yet more MSc yak-shaving.

I'm currently reading Melissa Schilling's book "Strategic management of technological innovation".

In a passage talking about customers' resistance to new inventions and the destruction of domain knowledge, it talks about the invention of the Dvorak keyboard. Supposedly better than the QWERTY keyboard - but ignored by the majority of customers.

August Dvorak is said to have died a bitter man, claiming, “I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don’t want to change!”

Is that true? The citation is maddeningly vague - as most citations are - saying only "Diamond, “The Curse of QWERTY.”"

Which Diamond? Dustin from Saved By The Bell? Which publication? Cat Fancier Quarterly?

A quick search found it on Wikiquote - albeit with a broken link. I found the original - a 1997 article by Jared Diamend.

August Dvorak died in 1975, a bitter man: I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, he complained. They simply don’t want to change!

Diamond doesn't list his sources. So it's off to Google books!

A search for a variation of that quote turned up 1972's Computers and People, Volume 21

Annoyingly, Google only shows a snippet, so we can't see who the author was or if the article is entitled "Imaginary conversations I had with great inventors while I was out of my gourd on drugs."

I couldn't find it in any easily accessible archives. The British Library only has Volume 22 onwards

Luckily, my Twitter gang are excellent

Indeed! The journal was called something else for Volume 21. And Archive.org has a scan of the full magazine:

Robert Parkinson simply called up Dr Dvorak and interviewed him! The article "The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard: Forty Years of Frustration" was the result.

The interview took place in 1962. Dvorak died three years after this article was published. As his keyboard layout didn't gain any significant traction between 1962 and his death, I suspect his attitude didn't alter.

Isn't it nice when quotes are accurate! And isn't it frustrating when authors don't go back to the source?

Did Nikola Tesla receive "nothing but insults and humiliation"?

@edent — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:49:49 +0000

I see this quote pop up occasionally:

But what's the source of it?

The most prominent source appears to be this article from March 2015 in Telegraf.rs. It is a series of letters purportedly written by Tesla to his mother just before she died. It contains the quote:

All these years I have spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation

But what's this at the bottom of the article?

Hmm... So, where did they get it from?

The only earlier work I've found for these letters is a post from January 2015 on the blog "SINESTETIČKI IMAGINARIUM".

The blog appears to mostly be poetry and other creative writing. The post claims to be the "first English translation of the last letter of Nikola Tesla". It contains such entries as:

Sunday the 22nd of November

This letter you will never receive, mother. I do not know why I am writing to you, the one who can never ever read this.

Rest in peace mother, and do forgive me that my roads brought me so far away from you that I cannot even come to your funeral.

I am reading the telegraph with the news of you passing away and I despise people who were not ready even two years ago to realise that electricity can be transmitted wireless. Now they saw it can be done but still they will not be able to use it for centuries, because someone has burned to the ground my laboratory in the centre of the town, with all my records and technical drawings.

There are a few problems with this.

The first wrinkle is that Tesla's mother, Đuka Mandić, died in 1892. The letters start on Wednesday 18th November. Which was a Friday.

(Although, as pointed out by Patrick Smears, Tesla's mother died in Croatia - which was still on the Julian Calendar. So, for her, it would have been a Wednesday.)

Most sources seem to agree that she died in April 1892. With Tesla travelling from America to Europe when he heard of her illness.

There's also the matter of the lab fire. Tesla's lab burned down in 1895 - 3 years after this supposed letter.

The book "Nikola Tesla, Correspondence with Relatives" published by the Tesla Memorial Society contains some of his surviving letters. The index of letters only has a few in 1892. None appear to be to his mother.

In his autobiography, Tesla says of the spring of 1892:

Imagine the pain and distress I felt when it flashed upon my mind that a dispatch was handed to me at that very moment bearing the sad news that my mother was dying. I remembered how I made the long journey home without an hour of rest and how she passed away after weeks of agony!

Later in the same book, he says:

But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother’s death. I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside she would surely give me a sign.

Two or three months before I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed, and I was under the full sway of these thoughts.

I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother.

The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true.

When I recovered I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort. I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother’s likeness.

The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.

I think this is fairly conclusive. Tesla had been lecturing in London in February 1892. A few months after that, he was with his mother in Easter. The Tesla Museum says:

Learning that his mother was close to death, he arrived in Gospic on April 15, just in time to say goodbye to the person he loved most of all.

After she died, he visited Zagreb in May 1892.

While we can never know how Tesla felt towards the end of his life, I think we can safely say that this "letter" couldn't have been written in November and is most likely a work of fiction. The "quote" is probably complete bunkum.

What's the origin of the phrase "we shouldn’t just be pulling people out of the river. We should be going upstream to find out who’s pushing them in"?

@edent — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 11:33:13 +0000

More yak-shaving for my MSc. A book I read was discussing data pipeline problems. How so much of the work of ETL is cleaning up crappy data and reformatting it to something useful.

We should be going to the source of the data, the book suggested. Rather than wasting time cleaning - get better at production. Or, as it pithily put it:

Whenever I see a generic quote like that, attributed to an authority figure, my Spider-Sense goes haywire. Did they really say that? Where's the evidence?

First step, as always, Twitter!

Twitter's quite a good way to search for something like this. Now that I have an upper-bound for the quote, I don't need to waste time looking in books published after that date.

WikiQuote is another good source, a discussion there was unable to source the quote.

Lots of places have it as a Tutu quote - without giving a specific date or place where he said it. Even the Noble foundation and the Sydney Peace Foundation use the quote. So it isn't just mawkish fluff on Pinterest.

My ~~Internet minions~~ good online friends help track down an early source of the quote.

That leads us to the 1975 paper "A Case For Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy Of Illness" by John B. McKinlay"

My friend, Irving Zola, relates the story of a physician trying to explain the dilemmas of the modern practice of medicine:

“You know," he said, “sometimes it feels like this.There I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore and apply artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, there is another cry for help. So I jump into the river, reach him, pull him to shore, apply artificial respiration, and then just as he begins to breathe, another cry for help. So back in the river again, reaching, pulling, applying, breathing and then another yell. Again and again,without end, goes the sequence. You know, I am so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration, that I have no time to see who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”¹

That reference points to "I.K. Zola, “Helping Does It Matter: The Problems and Prospects of Mutual Aid Groups.” Addressed to the United Ostomy Association, 1970."

Now, Tutu has been going since well before then (and long may he continue to do so) - but this gives us another earlier bound for our investigations. Did anyone say it prior to 1970-75?

First up, can wee see that original paper by Zola? No. There's a similarly named one at https://doi.org/10.1037/h0091061

But that 1972 reprinting doesn't have the (in)famous "Rivers" anecdote. I've contacted a past-president of the UOA to see if they have copies of the original, but no luck yet.

There are a cluster of mentions of "going upstream to see why people are falling in" in the 1971 record of the US congress:

So Dr Lourie was also using the story in 1971 - albeit in saltier language!

I've no idea if Lourie and Zola met - or whether it was just one of those zeitgeist tales which was doing the rounds back then.

Perhaps Tutu read it, or heard it somewhere, and then retold it? Perhaps... but there are fairly complete archives of his writing, speeches, and marginalia. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest he said anything even remotely resembling the quote.

But someone, probably in the early part of the 2010s, linked his name to it. A meme was born. And who can be arsed to fact check a fucking meme?

Oh.