The uses and abuses of famous quotations.

I’m a great fan of quotations. I have several collections of them in my personal library and often look them up on online web sites.

One thing that bugs me though is seeing people using randomly picked quotes to fill up pages on blogs and websites and even in some published books. My apologies if you are a blogger who has done this. I know it’s common, but it isn’t for me. I know how easily I could churn out pages full of work that I had no real hand in writing with just a modicum of Cut & paste activity.

A big problem with quotations and aphorisms, proverbs and sayings is that some people will try to live their lives by them. Shakespeare captures this brilliantly in the character of Polonius in Hamlet. Polonius gives his son, Laertes the proverbial advice “To thine own self be true.” In following such self-instinct, Laertes stubbornly comes to blame Hamlet for Ophelia’s death and ends up killing himself along with the troubled Danish prince.

Of course, Hamlet is in a work of fiction. Could people fall foul of a failure to grasp the truth about a well-worn saying in real life? Tragically, yes. What follows is how a quotation played a part in the infamous Jonestown People’s Temple Massacre.

My personal favourite quotation, much employed by Jones, as I’ll show shortly, has itself been subjected to some terrible misunderstanding and abuse. It is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana “Reason In Common Sense 1905).

If only those who drew us into two World Wars had lived by this quotation. It gained a powerful later resonance after the discovery of the Holocaust. It is quite justifiably often quoted to those falling sway to neo-nazis and right-wingers today. Few of them get the message. To those quoting Santayana it is like a magic mantra that the previously unwise only need to hear to be cured of their naivety. Sadly, that is not happening though.

In 1978, a religious cult leader Jim Jones led 912 of his followers to mass suicide in the jungle in Guyana. Jones joined them taking cyanide laced Kool-Aid and a bullet to his head whilst sitting on his Temple garden throne. Above his throne amidst a vast field full of corpses the rescuers of the few survivors saw a plaque. It read, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Jim Jones probably knew the quote well for many years before he moved his followers to Jonestown. He began his ministry as a mainstream and respected Baptist, helping the poor and the black communities in Indiana and later in California. He was a leading humanitarian, driven by concerns about the injustices faced by many in his flock. As the demands of the growing congregations exhausted him, Jones took to using drugs to keep himself awake and alert. They drove him crazy with paranoia and delusions. His grip on the cult became tyrannical. It was his paranoid delusions that made him see enemies everywhere and once under investigation by anti-cult experts, including US Congressman Leo Ryan, Jones snapped completely. He had Ryan and several of Ryan’s party assassinated and then led his congregation to their dreadful suicide. To Jones, it was Ryan and his other perceived enemies who had ‘forgotten the past’. He failed to see that the message was really an accusation against him. Be careful what you quote and how you live by the quotes you enjoy. Words, like magic spells at Hogwarts, can be dangerous.

Another of Santayana’s quotations “redoubling your effort after you’ve forgotten your aim,” referring to the Fascists who devastated Spain in the Civil War, was used by cartoonist Chuck Jones in describing Wile E Coyote’s relentless futile pursuit of The Roadrunner. An important statement inspired an amusing five-minute escapism trip. Since I read about that I can’t see the cartoons in quite the same way.

My rant is over. I’ll finish with one of Chuck Jones’s own cartoon quotations. “That’s All Folks!”

Arthur Chappell