Sunday, February 23, 2014

Damn You, Bonaparte!!

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Damn. It turns out Napolean formulated Leff's Fourth Law a couple hundred years earlier than I did. What's more, he stated it more eloquently than I did, and he wasn't even a native English speaker!

3 comments:

Matt Perry said...

It's quite commonly quoted, but not Napoleon. Hanlon's razor

Jim Leff said...

Matt, thanks for posting, it's good to know the most common attribution!

But as I unwittingly demonstrated (and that same Wikidedia entry confirms), multiple people often arrive at the same conclusion, and Napoleon seems to have said this a couple of centuries before computer geeks concocted Hanlon's Razor - which, in turn, beat me out by 23 years!

Matt Perry said...

The Napoleon attribution as been added to that wikipedia page before. It gets removed because there is no citation. You will not be able to find a citation either.

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