Quotable

Attribution is important. I believe in giving credit where credit is due. Acknowledging the creator as my source. When I find a quote, I like to investigate its origin and understand a bit about its author.

Quotes can pack a punch. Some of them jump off the page. They can be meaningful because they resonate with a philosophy to which we already subscribe but may not have expressed quite so efficiently. Others find their power in challenging your assumptions or causing you to examine things in a new way.

A lot of quotes seem to have to do with how you should live your life. They try to impart some hard-earned wisdom as encouragement or to advocate for change.

Does it matter who said it and should that alter our reading of it? Should we consider the context of their times and their failings? Should their checkered past change how we interpret their words today?

You come across a lot of quotes attributed to Winston Churchill for instance. In the luxury of our rear-view mirror, we now know there was a dark side to Churchill. When you read a quote like “if you are going through hell, keep going”, it is understandably magnified by the context of his role in history. It has significantly more meaning against a backdrop of the second world war.

A writer no more owns words, than a painter owns colours. It’s what you do with them. How you position and juxtapose them, the scale and perspective. Even these follow principles and structure. It still feels like a theft to lift a quote and not recognize the person behind it.

If I find a quote that means something to me, but the source is one that I find troubling, I make a judgement call on whether to omit the attribution and the baggage it carries. Can the thought stand on its own, neither given weight nor discounted as a consequence of the name next to it? Some sources are so murky that they often are attributed to the prolific “anonymous”. My convention when I want to be clear that I am not the source, but that the source is known, is to identify the source as “look it up”. Today, typing a few words from a quote into your search engine will retrieve a source for you.

I have a fear of whitewashing a reputation or somehow, by appreciating a quote, imply an endorsement of other thoughts or beliefs that I would not agree with. Quotes still speak to me.