Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hello,

I hope this is the right place to post my comment.

There are two different attributions for roughly the same quote:
1) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4242...
2) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9371...

I'm new here (just signed up minutes ago actually), so I'm not sure if we here care to distinguish or otherwise resolve the conflict above. If so, the following site suggests that the source is neither Twain nor Lang:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01...
Rather, the expression seems to have evolved from A. E. Housman's. I don't read much literature, and am not familiar with any of these men except Twain (a bit), but I do like Housman's choice of words best (though he speaks of manuscripts, not statistics): "...gentlemen who use [manuscripts] as drunkards use lamp-posts,—not to light them on their way but to dissimulate their instability.”

Also, I'm not certain that the two attributions for the quote in question are the only ones recorded on goodreads. Sorry, I tried to look for others, but find the search function not very precise.

Thanks

Hi, Nhuan. welcome to Goodreads.
Yes, we do handle such issues here so kudos to you for taking the step you just did :D
The quote in question is supposed to be attributed to Andrew Lang (see Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press; and Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press). I also did a search on different search engines only to have the same result returned. In fact, the source you provided, the quoteinvestigator.com, also expressly states those witty words are indeed Lang's, although A. E. Housman did write a "precursor" of sorts.

So the right thing to do here would be to merge the two quotes and remove Twain from the attributed authors. But unfortunately, "Twain's quote" has 6 adds so only a superlibrarian could do that. Better wait it out till one comes along, cheers.
P. S. I did remove replace Twain with Lang in the duplicate quote.

Nice! Thanks Jasmine, for the response and for being my lamppost, speaking as a sober person!