History: rhyming or nah?

This is from the annual letter of Kanbrick, an investment company run by Warren Buffett protege Tracy Britt Cool:

You’ve maybe heard this Mark Twain quote before. Here’s what bothers me: Twain never said this. It’s not anywhere in his writings (easily searchable). Maybe he said it to some person who wrote it down? Well, Quote Investigator can’t find that quote anywhere in print until 1970.

Twain did write this:

NOTE. November, 1903. When I became convinced that the “Jumping Frog” was a Greek story two or three thousand years old, I was sincerely happy, for apparently here was a most striking and satisfactory justification of a favorite theory of mine—to wit, that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.

but that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

Now, you might say, who cares? But, like, Kanbrick’s job is researching, and curiosity, and getting facts right. If Twain made this interesting statement, wouldn’t it be worth finding out to whom he said it? or where he wrote it? and in what context? Even Mark Twain didn’t go around saying aphorisms. He said stuff in a setting. If Kanbrick had gone looking for the context, they wouldn’t have found it. So, they weren’t curious?

Look, let’s let Kanbrick off the hook here, they’re an investment firm. But here’s Ken Burns in a graduation speech at Brandeis University:

We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. “No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history. I am interested in listening to the many varied voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes also dysfunctional republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind.

Now, Ken Burns at least gives the qualifier “supposed to have said,” but… Ken Burns made a 212 minute long documentary about Mark Twain! He must’ve steeped himself in Mark Twain! Did he not want to check out the context? I would guess that he just found it too good a quote to lose, and Mark Twain too good a source to put it too.

Here’s the IMF slapping down the quote without even a “supposed to have said.”

People chalk up quotes to Mark Twain and Churchill and Einstein all the time. That’s sorta just human nature to give these witty remarks to folk heroes famous for wisdom and smarts. The part that bothers is me is that no one, even in annual letters to investors and graduation speeches, was curious enough to be like “what was the context here for this quote I like? What was Twain saying? Where did he say it?”

It’s never been easier to find something like that out, it can be done in a few minutes. In the old days you had to walk to Cambridge and find the bookseller Bartlett, who knew every quote. Eventually Bartlett got tired of the inquiries and published a book, which is now an app.

Perhaps you’re thinking, Steve, who cares? These folks wanted to sauce their speech a little bit, does it matter? Maybe not. But as Mark Twain said, “what’s a personal website for if not working out life’s little irritants?”

Related: did Fitzgerald mean that thing about “no second acts in American lives“? Or did he conclude the exact opposite? (I’ve sometimes wondered if F. meant no second acts in the sense of like a three act Broadway play, like: American lives go right from the first act to the third act.)