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An Inconvenient Quotation
From Volume 16, Number 2 April 2007 issue of The
"Quote... Unquote" Newsletter
A3729 This issue’s Misattributing Something to Mark Twain Award goes to Al Gore. Claire Johnson told me that in his film An Inconvenient Truth, the former Vice-President attributes to the Sage of Hartford: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it is what you know for sure jus tain’t so.” Surely, Gore has access to a copy of the Library of Congress’s excellent work Respectfully Quoted? I can but reproduce its entry no 966 in its entirety:
“‘The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so’ – Attributed to JOSH BILLINGS (Henry Wheeler Shaw) by The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3d ed. (1979). Not verified in his writings, although some similar ideas are found in Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billings’ Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874). Original spelling is corrected: ‘What little I do know I hope I am certain of’ (p.502). ‘Wisdom don’t consist in knowing more that is new, but in knowing less that is false’ (p.430). ‘I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so’ (p.286). Walter Mondale echoed the words above in his first debate with President Ronald Reagan, October 7, 1984, in Louisville, Kentucky: ‘I’m reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said of Hoover. He said it’s not what he doesn’t know that bothers me, it‘s what he knows for sure just ain’t so.’ – Transcript, The New York Times, October 8, 1984. This has not been found in Rogers’s work.”
© 2007 by Nigel Rees
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