Who Said It: Scientists and Inventors
Science produces two kinds of famous quotation: the ones with a page number, and the ones that simply drifted towards the most famous available scientist. This set contains both, and labels which is which.
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Einstein and Edison are quote magnets
Between them, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison account for fourteen of the thirty one quotations here, and that is not because they were unusually quotable. It is because a certain kind of aphorism, brisk, encouraging and vaguely scientific, gets attached over time to whichever scientist the public can name. Researchers who study misquotation call this the Churchill effect, after its most extreme case in politics, and Einstein is its clearest scientific example. If a line sounds clever and nobody remembers who said it, it becomes an Einstein quote within a generation.
We do not hide this. Look at the source line that appears after you answer: several of the Einstein entries here are labelled Attributed, which is our way of saying the line is genuinely associated with him in the historical record but we cannot point at a book, letter or transcript. Others are traceable, such as the observation that imagination matters more than knowledge. The distinction is the entire subject of our note on how we research and verify every question, and it is why our writing about quotations reads more cautiously than most.
The Apollo 13 line in this set is the real one. What was actually transmitted, by command module pilot Jack Swigert in April 1970, was “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Jim Lovell repeated a version of it moments later. The famous present tense line, “Houston, we have a problem,” was written for the 1995 film. It is a better piece of screenwriting and a worse piece of history, and the film’s version has almost completely replaced the transmission in public memory.
The ones with a hard source
| Quotation | Who | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| I think, therefore I am | Rene Descartes | Discourse on Method, 1637 |
| Knowledge is power | Francis Bacon | Meditationes Sacrae, 1597 |
| The medium is the message | Marshall McLuhan | Understanding Media, 1964 |
| We are made of star stuff | Carl Sagan | Cosmos, 1980 |
| Genius is one percent inspiration | Thomas Edison | Harper’s Monthly |
| The best way to predict the future is to invent it | Alan Kay | Xerox PARC, 1971 |
Alan Kay's line is the one people most often get wrong in an interesting way. It is frequently credited to Peter Drucker or Abraham Lincoln, and Kay himself has said he first used it in a 1971 meeting at Xerox PARC, the research lab that produced the graphical user interface, the laser printer and much of what a modern computer looks like. When a quotation has a living author who has told you where it came from, that is about as good as attribution gets.
Why Edison sounds like a productivity poster
Eight Edison quotations appear here, and read together they are strikingly repetitive: hard work, hustle, stick with it, failure is data. That is not an artefact of our selection. Edison consciously built a public persona around perspiration rather than inspiration, in an era when the popular image of invention was the lone flash of genius. His famous claim about finding ten thousand ways that will not work is a piece of that campaign. Whether he phrased it exactly that way is doubtful, and our data marks it accordingly, but the sentiment is entirely his and is documented across decades of interviews.
The rest of the set
Beyond the two magnets, this deck covers Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Leonardo da Vinci, Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart and Maimonides, the twelfth century physician and philosopher whose advice to teach your tongue to say “I do not know” is arguably the most scientific sentiment in the whole collection. Hawking's three entries are all about the limits of knowledge rather than the content of physics, which is a fair reflection of how he actually talked in public.
If you play this set a few times, the pattern worth watching for is the distractor list. Every question offers four names, and the wrong three are chosen from the same broad field, so you cannot solve it by noticing that one option is a scientist and the others are footballers. You have to know, or infer from the register of the sentence, which is a genuinely learnable skill.
Frequently asked questions
Did Jack Swigert or Jim Lovell say the Apollo 13 line?
Jack Swigert transmitted “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here” first, and Jim Lovell repeated a version of it. The present tense “Houston, we have a problem” was written for the 1995 film and was never transmitted.
Why are so many Einstein quotes marked as attributed?
Because we can only find them associated with him in the historical record without a traceable book, letter or transcript. Einstein attracts unowned aphorisms more than almost anyone, so we label the ones we cannot source rather than presenting them as documented.
Who said the best way to predict the future is to invent it?
Alan Kay, in a 1971 meeting at Xerox PARC. It is often misattributed to Peter Drucker or Abraham Lincoln.
Does this practice set affect my daily streak?
No. Topic sets are practice only. Streaks and lifetime statistics come from the daily challenge on the main Who Said It page.
More Who Said It sets
- Writers and poets52 lines from Wilde, Twain, Angelou, Orwell and Woolf, and the two authors everything gets credited to.
- Leaders and activists56 lines from Churchill, King, Mandela and Roosevelt, and the Voltaire quote Voltaire never wrote.
- Founders and business26 lines from Jobs, Gates, Sandberg, Ford and Disney, including the Apple line a copywriter wrote.
- Philosophers and proverbs21 lines from Aristotle to Nietzsche, plus the proverbs with no author at all.
- Athletes and coaches23 lines from Ali, Jordan, Kobe, Gretzky and Lombardi, and who really wrote the butterfly line.
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