Others attribute the phrase to Einstein and say that he used it during the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, a transcript of which was eventually published in 1975. Several online sources cite his “Letters to Solovine,” from the 1950s. Still, some do say that Einstein did say this phrase at some point, even if he didn’t make it up. However, the original version of this Alcoholics Anonymous text does not appear to be online Google Books, for example, only has the 1992 version. Others point out that it seems to have been in oral use in the addiction-recovery community before that, as it was cited in a pamphlet from an addiction-recovery program in 1980, and in an Alcoholics Anonymous text published during the same year. Many point to a Narcotics Anonymous text, released in 1981, as the original source for this saying. Still, it appears that she was merely paraphrasing an expression that had been written elsewhere. The phrase “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results” can be found in her 1983 book Sudden Death. One source traces it back to the mystery writer Rita Mae Brown. What’s really interesting about all this misattribution is that nobody actually knows where the phrase came from. It’s been attributed to all sorts of people: Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Confucius, an old Chinese proverb, and most famously Albert Einstein, but there is little to no proof that any of them ever said such a thing. When observant readers got back to us pointing out that there’s little to no evidence Einstein did ever say this, we did look into it, though, and we realized there’s actually a lively debate about the origins of this quotation. In fact, all of our editors had seen that quotation attributed to Einstein in the past, and did not think to look into it further. I certainly didn’t when a writer for my former school newspaper turned it in. You likely didn’t blink seeing it at the beginning of the article. Perhaps, like many people, you’ve seen this quotation attributed to Albert Einstein before. “The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |