Citation Question: Who said, 'Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos'?
21 Nov 2022I was doing some tending here on the Quodid site today and I saw a citation to "Archbishop Ireland" and I got curious. I'd never heard of that person. Turns out, Wikipedia has a page for him is labeled "John Ireland (bishop)" And the man was a Catholic Bishop in the 19th century and into the 20th. He was the first Roman Catholic archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota (1888–1918). So I knew that was the right guy.
When in doubt here on Quodid, I normalize naming of famous people the Wikipedia way. I do this for a couple different reasons. One is simply that we use Wikipedia as a way to tell visitors more about the people we're quoting. The other is that I figure no where else have more people been able to weigh in on the question of what to call a person.
Anyway, to today's topic.…
Rebuilding the Blog
27 Oct 2022This is the first blog post in the Markdown-based version of the blog. I've basically rearchitected the tiny blog. It used to be a WordPress site. But I kind of fell out of love with WordPress. Especially in the midst of the little Laravel app that is Quodid.
So now the blog here is a little Markdown-rendering Laravel controller, and I've pulled the old posts over. Later I expect I'll want more features and to make the pages look better than they do right now. But really, I want the whole SITE to look better than it does right now. So I'm not too worried about that.
I'm using the PHP League's Commonmark package, which is fun. I've used it a few times before. Pretty fun.
Our Erroneous Citation of John Steinbeck as the Author of “Socialism never took root in America…”
15 Feb 2016A visitor sent an email yesterday about this quote we had published on the site, cited to John Steinbeck:
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
A quick web search makes very clear that we aren’t the first or the last publication to contain this misattribution of the quote. But indeed, it’s not from Steinbeck. It may seem like a reasonable thing for the famous 20th-century author of Grapes of Wrath, but these aren’t lines that can be directly traced back to him.
Such misattributions are common; student of quotations will be well aware that the words inside a quotation are often massaged, changed, and reshaped with time. Words also commonly latch on to unrelated famous people for no good reason whatsoever.
Considering this phenomenon, I like to call to mind a “good old boy” citing a quote he mangles…
Why Quotes, Why Quodid
01 Oct 2015Quodid is a passion project for its founder, David Hayes. And I’m going to stop writing in the third person now.
I started Quodid a few years ago, as a very part-time thing. It remains so to this day. While I do hope it eventually could be my livelihood, I know that it’ll need a lot more time and energy than I’m currently able to give for it to really reach that peak. But I do know that this is one of the most interesting and valuable things I can make.
To me, most of the most valuable and life-changing advise, wisdom, whatever I’ve received in my life was from simple ordinary banal quotations. Part of this is that I drifted away from the religion I was raised with to never return. So in my life the quotes like this utterly seminal one form Henry Miller are…