Hodgepodge 257/365 - Quotes

"For what it's worth . . . it's never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you're not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

At least, that was what I was led to believe from a Facebook/Instagram post by a friend, but it turns out this "quote" is really from the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and is spoken by Brad Pitt (with the courage at the end actually being strength). Apparently ones who know Fitzgerald said, "What? That doesn't sound like him!" And so I did a little research. Good ol' Internet. We always have to double-check everything, don't we? Or at least, very often we should.

Subsequent to this post, I realized that a spiffy quote that I logged just yesterday on Facebook, by John Steinbeck—"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"—is really a sort of paraphrase of a longer passage, from the 1966 book America and Americans: 

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.

"I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

Can't trust nobody no more. And that's the truth.