One of my favorite pointless pastimes is attempting to track down the provenance of supposed “famous quotes”. You’d be shocked (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many supposedly Deep Thoughts were never uttered by the people they’re attributed to.

For instance, it’s common to cite Aristotle as the source of this quote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Only, he never wrote or said that. It’s a summary of his ideas, sure, but it was written by somebody else. (Will Durant, two thousand years later.)

Anyhow, I developed the habit of tracking down sources for quotes when I was blogging regularly and writing articles/books. Because I’m a nerd, I was assiduous about proper attribution. A side effect of this habit is that I learned to be very distrustful of internet quotes. Internet quotes are frequently fabricated from whole cloth (or attributed to somebody famous when they’re actually from somebody unknown).

There’s no real reason to share this other than the fact that I just spent an hour in a futile attempt to track down the source of a quote that Kim loves:

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

Kim wants me to do an art project based on this quote, so naturally I’d like to find a reliable source for it and the actual text. This is proving an impossible task, because it seems likely that the quote was simply fabricated by somebody on Usenet in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Now, this quote is commonly attributed to Hunter S. Thompson. And who knows? It’s possible it is from him. However — despite the 5768 “likes” on Goodreads — it’s most assuredly not from The Proud Highway. It took a matter of three minutes to find a PDF copy of that book, then to search various words from the quote. Nothing even close to that sentiment can be found in the text. So, as usual, the internet is making shit up.

Sidenote

This is yet another reason that I don’t trust A.I. Artificial Intelligence is only as intelligent as the material on which it is trained. ChatGPT recognizes that there’s confusion as to the source of this quote, but still insists that it appears in The Proud Highway. Which it doesn’t.

When challenged, ChatGPT says, “Oh, maybe Thompson said it in Hell’s Angels.”

Again, a three-minute side adventure is enough to show that no, there’s nothing resembling this in the text of Hell’s Angels.

In my conversation about this quote with ChatGPT, it also cited Bill McKenna as the source — but in two different articles in two different magazines. Again when challenged, ChatGPT backs down saying the quote is “not substantiated”

So, yeah. This is just one tiny but representative example of why I don’t trust A.I. for jackshit. It’s been trained by the entirety of the internet. But most of the internet just isn’t very trustworthy.

Now, I was able to find this elusive quote in the text of a 2007 book by Mark Frost entitled The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever. Frost himself didn’t write or say this, but he attributes it to somebody else — an unnamed somebody allegedly used these words as a tribute to a friend who died in early September 2004.

That’s not an actual source for the quote, obviously, but it’s much closer than anything else I’ve found.

In the end, I’ve once again wasted a lot of time tracking down a quote only to come up empty-handed. Often, I am indeed able to find an actual source for a quote, but there are plenty of times like this where I spin my wheels only to get no results.

But I had fun! 🙂

(Also, the sad fact is that in trying to track down this quote, I was duplicating work already done by Quote Investigator. Ah well.)