Quotes About Apocryphal

#1. Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled "electricity" stuff. His apocryphal reply: "I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it".

Sean Carroll

#2. In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him.

Bill Bryson

#3. No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.

Sarah Vowell

#4. Settle yourself down for an apocryphal bedtime story. A programmer's parable, if you will ... .

Anonymous

#5. When I start asking my friends, "What do you think this means?" And it leads to way more interesting conversations than what it actually ends up meaning in the dictionary. Like "apocryphal," for instance.

Andrew Bird

#6. An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him.

John Frohnmayer

#7. There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway - but have never been able to produce an American victory.

Robert Cowley

#8. Oh Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief done! [Apocryphal]

Isaac Newton

#9. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat "in a contemplative mood" and "was occasioned by the fall of an apple.")

Stephen Hawking

#10. In a story so good that it should be apocryphal, Zappos offers graduates of their two-week paid training school $2,000 if they will quit their new jobs.

Seth Godin

#11. There was never any point in my life when I wasn't called Mr. Donen. I'm told my first words were, 'Call me Mr. Donen.' But I suspect that's apocryphal. My mother, Mrs. Donen, tended to exaggerate.

Stanley Donen

#12. The story about me, apocryphal or not, is that I could sing before I spoke. My parents went into bedroom one day and there I was standing in the crib singing God Bless America.

Linda Lavin

#13. I haven't even read everything I wrote.

Karl Barth

#14. Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the other.

Louis Stanley

#15. Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Margaret Atwood

#16. Mockery is an important social tool for squelching stupidity. I've never seen anyone change his mind because of the power of a superior argument or the acquisition of new facts. But I've seen plenty of people change behavior to avoid being mocked.

Scott Adams

#17. I wanted to be a priest when I was a kid.

Dan Savage

#18. Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#19. It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.

John D. MacDonald

#20. A lady came up to me one day and said 'Sir! You are drunk', to which I replied 'I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.

Winston S. Churchill