Years ago, exasperated by Facebook click bait masquerading as history quizzes that were so ridiculously easy that even Congressmen could pass them, I published my own extremely difficult version of a history trivia quiz. I doubt that anyone passed it.
Below is a list of actual quotations by famous politicians and authors, all concerning either reading or writing books. As a hint, I will tell you that no person is used more than once, no matter how many times Mark Twain shows up in the answers. Can you match the person with their quote?
1. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
a. Carl Sagan
b. Isaac Asimov
c. Marshall McLuhan
d. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
2. "I cannot live without books."
a. Abraham Lincoln
b. Umberto Eco
c. Thomas Jefferson
d. Ian Ballantine
3. “The reader always wants to know what happens next, whether he's reading The Brothers Karamazov, David Copperfield or Hemingway. If what happens next is purely physical, then you've got Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer shooting his initials in somebody's midsection. If what happens is spiritual, maybe you’re reading biblical chapters to find out what happened with Moses and the Red Sea. If it’s intellectual, you’re reading to find out maybe whether they are going to discover a cure for herpes. What happens next is the thing that keeps people reading, and the more important the next [thing is], then the more important the work is.”
a. John D. MacDonald
b. Lawrence Block
c. John Sandford
d. Lee Child
4. “If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”
a. John D. MacDonald
b. Lawrence Block
c. John Sandford
d. Lee Child
5. "I find reading a great comfort. People often say to me that they do not see how I find time for it, to which I answer them (much more truthfully than they believe) that to me it is a dissipation, which I have sometimes to try to avoid, instead of an irksome duty."
a. Abraham Lincoln
b. Winston Churchill
c. Andrew Carnegie
d. Theodore Roosevelt
6. “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
a. Mark Twain
b. Oprah Winfrey
c. P. J. O’Rourke
d. Dave Chappelle
7. “In politics I am growing indifferent - I would like it, if I could now return to my planting and books at home”
a. Harry Truman
b. Ulysses Grant
c. Abraham Lincoln
d. Thomas Jefferson
8. “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”
a. Abraham Lincoln
b. Ulysses Grant
c. Will Rogers
d. Henry Ford
9. “If you cannot read all your books… fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are.
a. J. K. Rowling
b. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
c. Winston Churchill
d. Lewis Carroll
10. “When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.”
a. Robert Heinlein
b. Ayn Rand
c. John Ford
d. Rex Stout
11. “Home is where the books are.”
a. Theodore Roosevelt
b. Franklin D. Roosevelt
c. Laura Ingalls Wilder
d. Sir Richard Francis Burton
12. “Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”
a. Hubert Humphrey
b. Ronald Reagan
c. Adlai Stevenson
d. Richard Nixon
13. “Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”
a. Harry Truman
b. John F. Kennedy
c. Jimmy Carter
d. Dwight Eisenhower
14. “Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.”
a. Tom Hanks
b. Bruce Willis
c. Bill Gates
d. Elon Musk
15. “I read books and talked to people. I mean that’s kind of how one learns anything. There’s lots of great books out there and lots of smart people.”
a. Tom Hanks
b. Bruce Willis
c. Bill Gates
d. Elon Musk
16. “l just sit in my office and read all day.”
a. Janet Yellen
b. Joe Biden
c. Warren Buffett
d. Kamala Harris
17. “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
a. Agatha Christie
b. J. K. Rowling
c. Pamela L. Travers
d. G. K. Chesterton
18. “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”
a. George Bernard Shaw
b. Oliver Wendell Holmes
c. Dorothy Parker
d. J. M. Barrie
19. “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
a. Robin Williams
b. Groucho Marx
c. Charlie Chaplin
d. Red Skelton
20. “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
a. Dave Barry
b. WC Fields
c. P.J. O’Rourke
d. George Burns
21. “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
a. Woody Allen
b. Dave Barry
c. George Burns
d. Steve Allen
22. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
a. Mark Twain
b. Cicero
c. Thomas Jefferson
d. John Glenn
23. “The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
a. J.K. Rowling
b. Agatha Christie
c. Isabel Allende
d. Mary Shelley
24. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
a. Carl Sagan
b. Robert Heinlein
c. Neil deGrasse Tyson
d. Theodore Sturgeon
25. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”
a. Walt Disney
b. Robert Louis Stevenson
c. Jack London
d. Johnny Depp
Well, how did you do? Frankly, I’d be surprised if you passed. I just took that history quiz from four years ago and just barely passed and I wrote the damn thing. Four years from now, I doubt that I can pass this damn thing. Still, there are a lot of nice quotes about books.
Answers: 1-b. 2-c. Though in conversations with Ian Ballantine, he did say something similar. 3-a. 4-b. If you have never read Block’s book on writing, I recommend it. 5-d. 6-a. I never said Twain wasn’t the right answer to one of these. 7-b. Unfortunately, Grant spent the last weeks of his life writing his autobiography while he slowly died of cancer. He finished the manuscript just days before he died. 8-a. 9-c. 10-a. 11-d. No, not the movie star, but the explorer. 12-b. 13-a. 14-c. 15-d. 16-c. 17-a. 18-a. 19-b. 20-c. 21-a. 22-b. 23-c. 24-a. 25-a.
If Einstein actually said all the things the Internet said he did, he'd have never had time to figure out the Theory of Relativity. To this day the Theory of Relativity would have been that you should never try to live with relatives or that dead fish and relatives begin to stink after 3 days.
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