Leisure

The Germans say it's from Goethe:

Entschuldigen Sie, dass ich Ihnen einen langen Brief schreibe, für einen kurzen habe ich keine Zeit.

 The Americans say it's from Mark Twain:

 I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

The French say it's from Voltaire, but it's from Blaise Pascal:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci [cette lettre] plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

I love that it's "loisir": leisure. And that it's Pascal, whose famous formulation about the troubles of humanity also implicitly touches on "loisir", here as "repos":

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.

If only we had the time to sit quietly and write shorter letters.

Voltaire misattributions

Voltaire was quoted often in the past week: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." But Voltaire never said that, as can be read in the "misattributed" section of the Wikiquote page on Voltaire.

Still, at least the quotation is from one person's attempt to sum up Voltaire's position on free speech. The same cannot be said of another Voltaire attribution that just crossed my path: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." This turns out to be a quotation from an American white supremacist named Kevin Strom (see the Wikiquote page again).

Voltaire did actually say a few things. Here's one of them (found by skimming that Wikiquote page): "Un bon mot ne prouve rien." Or as that page translates it, "A witty saying proves nothing."