The official blog of Standing Room. Music as it should be -- live, vibrant, and accessible.
Fred Shapiro, one of the contributors to the Freakonmics blog, asks readers to submit quotations he then attempts to source using the Yale Book of Quotations. This was in his most recent post:
Any thoughts on: “I care not who writes the laws of a people if you let me write their songs.” Snopes suggests attributing it or some variant to Plato or Napoleon, but offers no evidence.
Snopes is usually very reliable, so I’m surprised if that’s all that was said there.The YBQ has:
“If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, “An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Government for the Good of Mankind” (1704).
The first form is more eloquent, in my opinion.
