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Quotes Uncovered: Big Government and Peculiarities

Quotes Uncovered

75 ThumbnailHere are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently.

A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Douglas Lax asked:

Who originally said “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have” or “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have”? My search has attributed this quote to Thomas Jefferson, Barry Goldwater, and Gerald Ford. The truth?

This is usually attributed to Gerald Ford, but researcher Barry Popik has found it earlier, in Paul Harvey‘s 1952 book Remember These Things.
DanM asked:

I would say “That’s funny,” and my mother would respond “Funny ‘ha ha’ or funny peculiar?” I heard it once in the movie The Scarlet Pimpernel. (I think the movie was made in the 1930’s.) My mother never recalled where she heard it first, other than when she was a girl in Ireland (in the 1930’s).

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and even the Oxford English Dictionary trace this only as far back as 1938. The Yale Book of Quotations, however, quotes Mariel Brady, Genevieve Gertrude (1928) for the “funny ha-ha”/ “funny peculiar” distinction.
GB asked:

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” This one is ancient and over-worn, but who said it first?

I wouldn’t call it ancient, but it has been around since 1903, when George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?


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