Who said that?

One of my favourite pastimes obsessions is trying to find the correct attribution for quotes, phrases, stories, etc. [For example, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” was said by Knuth, not Hoare; I haven’t been able to track one Asimov quote despite a bit of looking, etc.]

Quite by coincidence, I found in the last hour three great webpages doing an impressive and thorough-looking (but alas, we’ll never know when something is thorough) job of it:

• Alan P. Scott trying to track down “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”
• Martin Porter trying to track down “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. (It has so many variations so frequently quoted that A Bit of Fry and Laurie in Series 4 had “For evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to spout clichés”.)
• Duen Hsi Yen on The Blind Men and the Elephant

There’s also a book by Ralph Keyes called The quote verifier: who said what, where, and when — looks great, must read.

If you have more examples, please let me know.

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More examples:

• Jeffrey E.F. Friedl on jwz’s ‘Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.’ (thanks to Karthik below)
• William J. Rapaport on Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (it’s his own sentence, so perhaps it shouldn’t count)

Partial ones:

• Rachel Loden on “Prizes are for children” by Charles Ives

Generic related:

• Prof. J Michael Steele has a page on quote variations.

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