Older Than They Think/Quotes

"Is there a thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been long ago, in the ages which were before us."

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer." Hans Gruber... Die Hard.

—Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

But before and before, and ever so long before
And such contrivances were used,
The whole Confucian sea-board had standardized the lee-board.
And hauled it up or dropped it as they choosed

—Rudyard Kipling, The Junk and the Dhow

A "new thinker," when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

—Frank Moore Colby

I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did.

—Bill Hicks, commenting on similarities between his stand-up comedy routine and Denis Leary's.

"Jack Kirby did it first and did it better."

—Old comic creator's proverb.

"Nothing is created, everything is copiated."

—Chacrinha, Brazilian TV host and humourist. The grammar was sacrified to maintain the rhyme.

Abby: It's like Bill Nye.
Gibbs: Who?
Abby: TV scientist? Had a kids show?
Gibbs: Ah, like Mr. Wizard.
Abby: Who?

—NCIS

That's right: The Bourne Identity was first a TV movie in 1988. Everything's a remake these days.

—Peter Paltridge, Platypus Comix's "Lost Art of TV Guide Advertising Vol. 6" (Unbeknownst to Paltridge, a book predated them both)

"Shakespeare's name, you may depend upon it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into dramatic shape... That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny; but this was all.

—Lord Byron, letter to James Hogg (24 March 1814), as quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 221.

Richard Dawkins has referred to his beliefs, which certainly include the four points above, as Einsteinian religion. Dawkins’ description of this creed is poetic and extremely reminiscent of Emerson’s Divinity School Address. Has he never heard of Transcendentalism? Is he unaware that Emerson was a Unitarian minister?
Einstein certainly believed in the four points as well. Did he invent them during his annus mirabilis? Did they arrive in a stroke of light along with Brownian motion, special relativity and the photoelectric effect? Probably not, because the four points also feature very prominently in a little book called Looking Backward, which appeared in 1888 and sold about a bazillion copies. The author of this novel was not a Hindu. His readers were not Zoroastrians. The political movement Bellamy helped spawn did not put its faith in Allah. And nor were any of these folks atheists, which was still quite a dirty word at the time.

— The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective by Mencius Moldbug [1]