War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

I thought that was a pretty good quote, snarky and true enough, so I started writing a post highlighting it, and went to look for where Bierce wrote it (I always like to include a citation for a quote whenever possible) -- unfortunately, I couldn't find one. Neither Googling nor a search through my library of quotation reference books brought up a source. Most Internet citations carry it without attribution, or with an "(atributed)" disclaimer, or with no attribution at all, as in "someone once said".

The most obvious source would be Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, but my copy has a much more interesting (and much more cyncial) entry for "War":

War n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end -- that change is the one immutable and eternal law -- but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his "stately pleasure dome" -- when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu -- that he

heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war.

One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of the elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal emity provide the night.

Not nearly as pithy as the shorter quote, but perhaps an order of magnitude smarter, a true example of reality-based observation. (And Bierce was writing between 1881 and 1911, well before the "peace" of The Great War turned out to be only a 20 year armstice before World War II.)

Back to the original quote, though -- a deeper Google search brought up the possibility that it originated not with Bierce at all, but with comedian Paul Rodriguez, (see here, here, here and here, for instance), which makes somewhat more sense, since the quote has a very modern feel to it, and seems as if it would work well in a contemporary comedian's routine. Unfortunately, I've also not be able to find any citation for where and when Rodriquez said it, so we're stuck with dueling attributions.

I'm inclined to think that it's not from Bierce, but from Rodriguez. (This person agrees as to Bierce.) I've sent an e-mail to Rodriguez through his website asking for any help he might be able to give.

Misattributed quotes are an online plague, going back to the days of Usenet, and probably Arpanet as well. In 1992, in Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations, Ralph Keyes gave us:

The Rules of Misquotation

• Axiom 1. Any quotation that can be altered will be.
• Corollary 1A: Vivid words hook misquotes in the mind.
• Corollary 1B: Numbers are hard to keep straight.
• Corollary 1C: Small changes can have a big impact (or: what a difference an a makes).
• Corollary 1D: If noted figures don't say what needs to be said, we'll say it for them.
• Corollary 1E: Journalists are a less than dependable source of accurate quotes.
• Corollary 1F: Famous dead people make excellent commentators on current events.


• Axiom 2. Famous quotes need famous mouths.
• Corollary 2A: Well-known messengers get credit for clever comments they report from less celebrated mouths.
• Corollary 2B: Particularly quotable figures receive more than their share of quotable quotes.
• Corollary 2C: Comments made about someone might as well have been said by that person.
• Corollary 2D: Who you think said something may depend on where you live.
• Corollary 2E: Vintage quotes are considered to be in the public domain.
• Corollary 2F: In a pinch, any orphan quote can be called a Chinese proverb.

My own modest addition to this, posted 10 years ago (!) on the Usenet newsgroup alt.quotations, was:

[A]ny quote which sounds vaguely appropriate to do so will sooner or later be attributed to H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain or Albert Einstein.

Other folks contributed Oscar Wilde and George Barnard Shaw to the list, but Ambrose Bierce would be a good addition as well, especially considering his own take on it, from The Devil's Dictionary:

Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

As Twain once said (or was it Shaw? Or Cidermills?)

It doesn't matter who the author is, if the quote is good enough.

Correction: For some reason I got the name of the proprietor of the weblog that started all this, What is The War?, wrong -- it's Matthew Duss not "Paul Duss." My apologies for this inadvertant error. I've correct the text above.