Friday, August 14, 2009

Some Men See Things As They Are....

...and ask Why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?

I read this on a bio page and saw that it was attributed to Robert Kennedy. Something didn't feel right about this attribution, so did spent a time doing Google searches. I mean, RFK was a quotable person, I guess, but why would he say such a thing? It sounds more like something an inventor would say. I could hear Edison, or Disney, or even DaVinci saying it, but RFK?

I found that George Bernard Shaw was the original source of this line. GBS, was of course, an Irish writer of the 19th and 20th centuries. Wow....that sounds like it was hundreds of years ago, but we're less than a decade from the 20th.

Now, could RFK have used this quote in a speech? Absolutely. I'm not saying RFK didn't quote GBS, or even that he spoke the words without proper attribution. I don't really care about that. I just happened across a quote attributed to RFK that would have been more properly attributed to GBS and for some reason felt I needed to set a record straight somewhere.

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