SourceFilter - Quote Edition

October 25, 2015 3:24 PM

Fiancee is trying to find out if this quote: "One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children." is actually by Carl Sagan, so she can use it for a paper. I can't find it anywhere. Is this actually something Sagan said or is the internet being the internet?

Only places I've found are Pinterest, random websites, and a book intro to a non-reliable book. Is there anything she can source for her paper? I'm starting to think this was made up. I've searched the scripts of Cosmos and the book text as well.

posted by motioncityshakespeare to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

if you use google's search tools to restrict the date, it seems to appear first on a couple of sites in jan 2001. none were attributed. this search from pre-2001, doesn't have a single hit.

it does look like someone invented it in jan 2001.
posted by andrewcooke at 3:45 PM on October 25, 2015

Best answer: So it looks like it comes from this Parade article, written by Sagan, in 1994, but I don't think it's in the actual article -- it's a subhead/caption (?), which means a headline writer could have written it. I've skimmed the article twice and don't see it there, but I may have missed it.
posted by jaguar at 3:53 PM on October 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

I've just spent the afternoon looking at Pinterest and other quotation sites for pithy words of wisdom for a project I'm doing. It was amusing to see the same little aphorisms attributed to, say, Albert Einstein, Maya Angelou, and Marilyn Monroe. Just completely random. I'd guess your quote was just made up and Sagan's name was tacked on to it.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 3:53 PM on October 25, 2015

Response by poster: jaguar, that's amazing, thank you! I'm not sure if it's him or not either, but at least it's some kind of source.
posted by motioncityshakespeare at 4:07 PM on October 25, 2015

After having read the article again, the quotation's not in it and I would place money on it not being his writing but that of a caption writer, especially as the photo it's captioning is listed as a stock photo, so it's unlikely Sagan would have had much to do with it.
posted by jaguar at 4:16 PM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh! Go jaguar!
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 4:18 PM on October 25, 2015