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"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as stands." -- Robert Benchley, "Quick Quotations" (thanks to austin_dern, who observed, "I note in the lists of Robert Benchley quotations I see in standard compilations, the second sentence above is trimmed, and I don't know if it's because the compiler didn't get the joke, or did."

(And a bonus quotation simply because I couldn't resist providing another example: "Stay serious. Folk songs are serious." -- Arlo Guthrie. Go ahead and click through for the context...)

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There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

You know, I've never seen the book in question, but I was told, when I was 15 and developed a very big Dorothy Parker/Algonquin Club thing, that this is an urban myth - which seems to be backed up by web searches. I can't think why the Robert Benchley Society wouldn't include the full quote, for example. According to google, there is *1* hit for "wouldn't make any sense if quoted as" (there are none for the full quote as given above), and more to the point, that one hit is unattributed, on a cached page that doesn't exist anymore.

It seems to me that if that was the full quote, there'd be at least one googleable site where someone made a point of the irony of what gets cut off.

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You've got more faith in the completeness of the web than I do. (I keep noticing how many songs don't have lyrics posted anyehere yet.) Note that in the entry from which I swiped thwe quote,

austin_dern says he was reading the book in question:

Reading: My Ten Years In A Quandary And How They Grew, Robert Benchley. ``The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense of quoted as stands.'' -- From the essay ``Quick Quotations,'' about how nobody sounds really sensible in the quotes posterity chooses to remember, and the speaker should get at least three sentences to be reasonably safe against being unjustly thought fatuous. I note in the lists of Robert Benchley quotations I see in standard compilations, the second sentence above is trimmed, and I don't know if it's because the compiler didn't get the joke, or did.

I agree that it's funny that nobody else has posted the longer version, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the "standard compilations" and web sites mostly cribbed from each other.

I know that the editor of the Quotation Of The Day Mailing List has edited some of my submissions to include bits that were omitted from every web source I could find. Ifwhen I get to a library, I'll look for a copy of the book myself. It doesn't seem to be in Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), alas. But I'm having less trouble believing that half the quote simply got chopped off by whatever favourite book of quotations most web sources eventually trace back to, especially in light of

austin_dern's statement that he was quoting directly from the book itself.

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I suspect that Robert Benchley's too recent an author to be in Project Gutenberg; he died in 1945, and probably most of what he wrote is still under copyright. Anyway the quote is certainly real; I've got the book open right now to the essay. Quoting it a bit more fully:

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense of quoted as it stands.

The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn't sound so sensible in short snatches.

Take par (for) example, one of those newspaper columns of ``Quotations of the Week,'' which has just dropped onto my desk, after a three-hour hunt for it on my part.

Granted that some of them wouldn't stack up very high even if they were quoted in full, they can't all be as fatuous as they sound:

(And Benchley goes on to give examples, such as .. .)

``Life does not come all in one piece like cheese; it more resembles linked sausages, a series of events on a string.'' -- Harold Bell Wright.

(One has a horrible suspicion that Mr Wright's remark really ended with that.)

Benchley's final advice:

The best way to do, if you are one of those unfortunate people who are likely to be quoted in print, is to say everything you have to say in one long, periodic sentence, so that it can't be broken up. Or, better yet, say nothing at all. (Don't quote me as having said that.)

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Thanks; I'd been hoping you still had the book handy.

BTW, one of his works is in Project Gutenberg. I'm guessing it's one of his earliest ones.

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Oh, splendid ... and yes, Love Conquers All is one of the earlier books ... it would follow that it's one I've got in print, wouldn't it? Nobody's got 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, or David Copperfield.

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Second quote link _KILLED_ me, by giggles. Thank you!

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Hearing it on the radio had a similar effect on me a month or two ago. (How I'd missed hearing it until then, I don't know.)

Especially the explanation of the popularity of four-part harmony.

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I dunno, you guys. It had me sitting there with a cocked eyebrow, thinking "Too much drugs... Way, way too much drugs..."

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Heh. Which in turn reminds me of how I got the nickname "Moonunit" in college ... (I'll relate the tale if anyone's interested.)

Of course, I was also giggling at the fact that we were supposed to giggle over the idea of clams having feet, when clams already do have feet in real life (one foot per clam). The little ones just ain't got legs.

Whoops. Just gave m'self a ZZ Top earworm there ...

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