Mark Twain and Albert Einstein: Separated at Birth?

Or maybe they just had the same hairstylist: no one.

Can you figure out who said what?

1. "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

2. "A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."

3. "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

4. "All generalizations are false, including this one."

5. "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

6. "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

7. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

8. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." (Note the similarity to 3.)

9. "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."

10. "Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others."

11. "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

12. "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

13. "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

14. "To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal."

15. "The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it."

16. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

17. "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today."

18. "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

19. "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it."

20. "Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."

1. E.  2. T  3. E.  4. T  5. T 6. E  7. E. 8. T 9. T  10. T 11. E  12. E  13. E 14. T  15. T 16. E.  17. T  18. E  19. T 20. E

How'd you do? If you can't believe some of the answers, check my sources for the Einstein quotes, and for the Twain. And let me know if I've made any mistakes. It was easy to get very mixed up.

This quiz is in honour of the publication of Autobiography of Mark Twain, the first sample chapter of which I downloaded to my kindle last night. Unfortunately the first chapter consisted of pages and pages of academic notes. I can generally get a good hit off those frees of e-books but not in this case. Because of my kindle, I am beginning to be extremely widely read -- as long as one counts only the first chapters of books. Still, I dare say this makes me more knowledgeable than many a cocktail party guest or book club participant and they don't refrain from commenting.