False Quotations

This entry was posted by on Sunday, 8 May, 2005 at

This was a post I had planned to write last summer but never quite got around to it. Later, I knew that there were two things that I wanted to mention, but I could not remember the second one at all… until today.

Over the summer, there was a small group from my church that frequented the Redlands Bowl. Inscribed over the stage is the phrase, “Without vision, a people perish.” Growing up in Redlands, I had occasion to read this a great many times. However, one evening, a speaker there mentioned that the phrase comes form the book of Proverbs. It does? WHERE? For at the time, I was actually reading through the entire book once a month, and never caught it. The problem, I discovered, is that I was reading Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint (Prov 29:18), which, I dare say, is not quite the same thing.

Mother is the word for God on the lips and hearts of children everywhere. This was one of the better lines from the movie, The Crow. In fact, if you do a Google search, you will likely find it attributed to Brandon Lee. This is wrong. First of all, the quote is in the comic book that the movie is based on, so it really ought to be attributed to the writer, James O’Barr. It turns out, this too is wrong. Also last summer, I was surprised to read that quote in Vanity Fair. (The book, not the magazine.) I don’t know exactly when it was written, but I believe that Thackeray was a contemporary of Dickens.


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