The Mother of Coincidence
From Mark Dionne
Someone wrote me, and mentioned this quote:
Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous
I hadn’t heard it before, so I looked it up with Google. It was surprising how many people it was credited to, but the winners seemed to be Albert Einstein and Doris Lessing.I decided to count who was the winner. Albert got something like 33 hits with the quote written exactly as above. Doris got NONE. But if I look for the “coincidences are” variation, Doris gets about 36. Einstein gets NONE.
This is pretty interesting, suggesting that on one (or both?) branches of the history, there was an early misquote that has been perpetuated very accurately. OR, that both came up with the same quote. OR, that one of them stole it from the other. OR, that both were quoting an earlier source.
Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
