The problem with Google is similar: too many results.

January 28, 2007 11:29 AM

Did Oscar Wilde actually say, "The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings"? If so, where or when? If not, who said it?

I've done some googling, and it seems the line has been variously attributed to either Wilde, George Orwell, or George Bernard Shaw. There were all socialists of some stripe, so that's no help. An Amazon search of the complete works of Wilde turns up no results, and all the googling I've been able to do calls it a 'famous quip' or a 'well-known witticism,' rather than giving a citation. Google Scholar turns up this, which you'll notice promises an endnote giving the citation, but I can't get hold of the book. So I'm stuck. Any ideas!

posted by anotherpanacea to media & arts (18 comments total)

I wouldn't assume that footnote offers a specific citation. It may say something like "Oscar Wilde is widely reported to have said this, though no specific citation exists," which seems to be the case if you search Google Books for the key phrases rather than the exact quote. Most of the results have quotes with uncertain citations to Wilde, e.g. "is alleged to have said" or "once reportedly quipped."
posted by scottreynen at 11:45 AM on January 28, 2007

Much trawling of Jstor et al yields this citation:

OSCAR WILDE, A LIFE IN QUOTES 238 (Barry Day ed., 2000)

(“The trouble with Socialism
[sometimes rendered as “democracy”] is that it takes up too many evenings [sometimes rendered as
“meetings”].”).

This was referenced (footnote 10) in Peace and Justice: Notes on the Evolution and Purposes of Legal Processes, in the Georgetown Law Journal Vol 94 pp 553-580.

SSRN here, to download full paper (may require institutional access).
posted by matthewr at 11:52 AM on January 28, 2007

If it's important, and no-one finds a better citation on the web, I could go and look at "Oscar Wilde : a life in quotes" tomorrow in the university library, and let you know what it says.
posted by matthewr at 12:00 PM on January 28, 2007

Wilde was a famous wit at dinner parties.
So the fact that it isn't found in his writings does not mean it's not by him.
posted by jouke at 12:10 PM on January 28, 2007

But the fact that far more "quotes" are attributed to him than were ever said by him should give you pause. If there are no citations to a specific work of his, the presumption should be that it's incorrectly attributed. See my comment in a similar AskMe thread for further discussion and a book recommendation.
posted by languagehat at 12:25 PM on January 28, 2007

matthewr, you rock! No need to hunt down the text, though thanks for offering. I generally trust law review cites, since there's a bunch of overachieving law students checking them. I'm engaged to one!

languagehat wrote: "If you wanted to make sure you yourself never misattributed a quote, you'd spend your life doing nothing but researching quotes."

You're right... I've been researching this off and on for the past week. Read a lot of lovely Wilde essays, but no luck. What a strange substitute for scholarship this quote-hunting is.
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:44 PM on January 28, 2007

This is the literary equivalent of Stigler's law of eponymy: Attributions tend to stick to better-known people.
posted by vacapinta at 1:00 PM on January 28, 2007

I thought it was Oscar Wilde's Law of Eponymy?
posted by The God Complex at 1:45 PM on January 28, 2007

As some above have noted, the usual caution that needs to be taken with unestablished attributions may require special application when the origin is alleged to be Wilde.

A Google search restricted to gutenberg.org and a few greps of various works by Wilde do not locate it. The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde (ed. Alvin Redman) also just now happens to be on my table; I scanned the text (with particular attention to the sections on "people", "life", "conduct", "politics", "friendship", "society", and "time") and have not found it or anything similar. (I don't know where the author of A Life in Quotes might have found it; I'd like to know.)
posted by yz at 2:08 PM on January 28, 2007

yz, if I have a spare minute tomorrow I'll nip round and look at it.
posted by matthewr at 2:12 PM on January 28, 2007

Because I was curious, I took a stroll down to the UIUC main library to find Autonomie et autotransformation de la société. Here's footnote 20:

For an earlier and more elaborated formulation of this intuition see, famously, Benjamin Constant, "The liberty of the Ancients compared with of the Moderns", Political Writings, edited and translated by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 309-328.

How helpful! :)
posted by sbutler at 2:24 PM on January 28, 2007

Here's the text of the Constant essay, if anyone's interested; the conclusion is:

The work of the legislator is not complete when he has simply brought peace to the people. Even when the people are satisfied, there is much left to do. Institutions must achieve the moral education of the citizens. By respecting their individual rights, securing their independence, refraining from troubling their work, they must nevertheless consecrate their influence over public affairs, call them to contribute by their votes to the exercise of power, grant them a right of control and supervision by expressing their opinions; and, by forming them through practice for these elevated functions, give them both the desire and the right to discharge these.

It does sound like it would take up a lot of evenings.
posted by languagehat at 3:31 PM on January 28, 2007

LADY BRACKNELL
[Sternly.] . . . What are your politics?

JACK
Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

LADY BRACKNELL
Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.


Because the socialists, you see, are all at meetings?
Best I could do. Oh well.
posted by washburn at 7:51 PM on January 28, 2007

matthewr: I guess I'd like to know, too. My university library can order the book, though, if it's too much bother.

sbutler: Thanks for that. Constant's essay is definitely not about avoiding socialism for its time commitments: he's differentiating the ancient form of liberty, which involved a great deal of involvement in affairs of state (what we'd now call sovereign power) from what we moderns think of as liberties. An important distinction, yes, and a good reason to ignore Rousseau and Saint-Just, but not quite the same as a denigration of the boring business of participatory democracy.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:40 AM on January 29, 2007

After all that, the Barry Day book ("Oscar Wilde: A Life in Quotes") merely says "Attributed" next to the quote.
posted by matthewr at 6:44 AM on January 29, 2007

Wow. Thanks for doing the footwork, matthewr. I stand corrected on the dependability of law review articles.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:13 AM on January 29, 2007

Incidentally, there's a BBC Radio 4 programme called Quote Unquote that tracks down quotations for listeners. It's presented by Nigel Rees, whose website is here. He keeps a list of a 'hard core' of quotations which have defeated readers and listeners. The 'too many evenings' quote appears on this list. I gather that Rees and his loyal band of quotation-hunters have a bit of a reputation for unearthing obscure sources, so if it defeats even them, I'd be tempted to conclude that this quote's origin is lost to the mists of time.
posted by matthewr at 7:15 AM on January 29, 2007

After all that, the Barry Day book ("Oscar Wilde: A Life in Quotes") merely says "Attributed" next to the quote.

Thanks, matthewr. Somehow it wasn't too difficult to imagine that something like that was going to be the source. . . .
posted by yz at 11:14 AM on January 29, 2007