360
votes
Did Karl Marx write that slavery had good sides and abolishing it would indirectly destroy modern civilization?
tl;dr: No. Marx wrote that Proudhon would say that slavery had good sides (as part of his criticism of Proudhon).
This quote is from a letter from Marx to Annenkov. But it is important to look at the ...
tim♦
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266
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Did Valerie Jarrett say she wanted "America to be a more Islamic country"?
No; the caption is written in the Calibri font. This font was not developed until 2002.
Source: https://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation/calibri
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258
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Did Valerie Jarrett say she wanted "America to be a more Islamic country"?
The Stanford yearbook in 1977 is mostly photos without captions.
(There is no Valerie Bowman on this page anyway, because she didn't graduate until 1978.)
It does have a few short comments that ...
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Has Phil Karlton ever said "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things"?
As his only son, and colleague with him at Netscape from 95-97, I can attest that my dad did indeed throw that quote around, on more than one occasion. I'm fairly confident that he originated it (he ...
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202
votes
Accepted
Did Donald Trump say that "global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese"?
He did write this on his twitter feed[archived]
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
See also politifact: Yes, ...
tim♦
- 52k
195
votes
Accepted
Did Bernie Sanders say that a woman cannot be president?
Did Sanders say that a woman cannot be president or that that women in general lack the abilities?
No.
While some headlines – including this question's title – claim that, this is not what Warren ...
tim♦
- 52k
194
votes
Accepted
Did Einstein say this about his marriage?
Very unlikely. This is sometimes attributed to Einstein on his 50th Wedding anniversary
Einstein was married twice:
The first marriage was to Mileva Marić, from January 1903 until their divorce on ...
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185
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Did Valerie Jarrett say she wanted "America to be a more Islamic country"?
Just addressed by Snopes apparently,
The quote to attributed “Valerie Jarrett, Stanford University, 1977” about her “seek[ing] to help change America to be a more Islamic country” is an unfounded ...
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182
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Did JFK call himself a jelly donut in his famous Berlin speech?
No, it wasn't interpreted that way. Berliner is a name for a doughnut, similar to a Frankfurter being a type of sausage. However, it does also mean living in/being from Berlin, similar to Londoner.
...
- 1,343
156
votes
Accepted
Did Einstein comment on feeling the presence of Jesus while reading the Gospels?
There is certainly a quote within a purported interview with Einstein in which the phrase appears and is attributed to Einstein (see Morgoth's answer). As such, the claim can be considered one that ...
- 2,140
156
votes
Accepted
Did Susan B. Anthony make these statements regarding suffrage for women and former slaves?
Short version: Susan B. Anthony had a long history of working as an abolitionist, but wasn't willing to settle for gradual victories on the way to women's suffrage. Combine that with a notorious ...
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155
votes
Did Sasha Johnson state “the white man will not be our equal but our slave"?
The tweet in question (alternative archive link) was very likely sent from a fake account (although Twitter being what it is, this is unlikely to ever be conclusively proven either way). The account ...
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143
votes
Is the Gregorian calendar the "most accurate calendar ever devised"?
Is Neil Tyson's claim that the Gregorian calendar is the “most accurate calendar ever devised” true?
TL; DR:
The Gregorian calendar qualifies as "most accurate" if one defines "most ...
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119
votes
Accepted
Neil Armstrong: “One small step for man” or “one small step for a man”?
It seems that he fluffed his line. He meant to say "a man", but inadvertently missed out the "a". It is also possible that the "a" was masked by static.
What did Neil ...
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116
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Did JFK call himself a jelly donut in his famous Berlin speech?
No.
The Berliners (people) do not call berliner (jelly doughnut) a "Berliner", they call it Pfannkuchen (which - curious part here - stands for a pancake in some other parts of Germany). So even if ...
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116
votes
Accepted
Did Emmanuel Macron call a teenager an "idiot?"
To summarise up front, he used the word imbécile which is more or less like "idiot", but he used it as an element of an idiomatic figurative phrase which means "you can play-act someone who doesn't ...
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113
votes
Is the quote "Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it." attributable to Peter Thiel?
No: This is ¾ of the/a slogan of/blurb for the tabletop RPG Eclipse Phase, not a quote from Peter Thiel. Eclipse Phase describes itself as “the post-apocalyptic game of transhuman horror”. The full ...
110
votes
Did Einstein say this about his marriage?
The quote is really that of Garson Kanin as author of the 1974 book Hollywood: Stars and Starlets, Tycoons and Flesh-peddlers, Moviemakers and Moneymakers, Frauds and Geniuses, Hopefuls and Has-beens, ...
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108
votes
Did Bernie Sanders say that a woman cannot be president?
@tim's answer is excellent, but I'd like to address the question from a different angle.
This question's request for "earlier sources" is problematic. There were only two people present in the ...
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107
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Accepted
Did Marx's mother say she wished he would accumulate capital instead of writing about it?
I could not find a source of Marx's mother saying it, only Marx retelling it. This quote, or some variation, is likely real and may have even been a joke said by Marx when he was talking about his ...
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106
votes
Accepted
Did Einstein say this quote about war & patriotism?
Yes, roughly. This appears to be based upon a quote from his 1931 essay, Mein Weltbild (or "The World As I See It"), which was originally published in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the ...
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106
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Did Einstein say imagination is more important than knowledge?
It appears that Einstein did in fact say this on multiple occasions, but most notably in his 1931 book Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms.
At times I feel certain I am right while not ...
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101
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Did Hitler say this quote about education?
It is entirely possible that Hitler said something of the sort, although it is rather a stretch to say it is about homeschooling.
The law making school attendance compulsory was actually passed in ...
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96
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Accepted
Did Martin Schulz say that it is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate?
He did not.
The French newspaper Le Monde released an article debunking this claim.
The origin of the quote is a German satirical article from Contra Magazin.
(source: lemde.fr)
Original quote in ...
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Did new Brazilian president Bolsonaro say he'd rather have a dead son than a gay one?
Yes.
In an interview with the Brazilian version of the Playboy magazine (in Portuguese, published June 2011, available on Archive.org), when asked what he would do if his son "turned homosexual&...
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Did Oppenheimer quote the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity test?
No.
In the 1965 documentary "The Decision to Drop the Bomb", Oppenheimer described the moments after the bomb's explosion:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a ...
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94
votes
Did Sasha Johnson state “the white man will not be our equal but our slave"?
The tweet is still available in the wayback archives.
The account in question is suspended from twitter, but the archives show that this was an account that was only active for a short time in August ...
tim♦
- 52k
91
votes
Accepted
Did Henry Kissinger say this about forced vaccinations?
No, there is no evidence this is an actual quote
Reuters has investigated this issue and came to conclusion:
Henry Kissinger’s speeches are archived on his website and only two are listed for 2009 ( ...
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Did Margaret Sanger say "The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it"?
Indeed she did. The full quote comes from her 1920 book Woman and the New Race, and is as follows:
The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The ...
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