"katysails" wrote in message
...

Shouldn't he be above plagiarism? (snort)


".....substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously
drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a
pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them;
whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the
little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his
temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. . . . It
takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a
phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other Important thing--
and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his
little mite--that is all he did.
In 1886 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a
half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to
dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten years afterward I was talking with
Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he; . . . and so
when I said, "I know now where I stole, but who did you steal it from?" he
said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I
have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had."

Mark Twain in a letter to Letter to Anne Macy. Reprinted in Anne Sullivan
Macy, The Story Behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran,
and Co., 1933), p.162.


Satisfied now?

BC