Shakespeare did not want to kill all the lawyers and Robert Frost did not believe that good fences were good neighbors. Sometimes people use famous quotes from famous people to back up their arguments. And all too often, the words they quote were not only not intended to support what they are saying, but actually mean the opposite. Quoting out of context is undoubtedly as old as speaking out of place. Which is fine as long as the person you are quoting uses the quote to mean what they originally did. Otherwise, when someone says, “As Shakespeare said, we must first kill all the lawyers,” there is always the danger that someone like me will say, “But Shakespeare didn’t say that.” So if I’m lucky, there is a dispute that allows me to explain that Shakespeare wrote the line on Henry VI Part 2 (Act IV, Scene II), but never said anyone should kill lawyers. It was not its opinion. In fact, he put the line, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, who was part of a mob of rioters who knew what they were planning was illegal and thought that if there were no lawyers that would not be processed. Besides being inaccurate, it is not fair for Shakespeare, or any other speaker, to misrepresent the meaning of his words.

It’s the same with the fence. Most of the time, “Good fences make good neighbors” is used to support an argument for fences by someone who never read the poem from which it was taken. On Fence repair, the person making the statement is a neighbor with whom Frost would not you agree. A few lines later, Frost wrote: “There’s something a fence doesn’t love.” Frost, in his own voice, says that he does not like fences unless they are necessary to keep livestock confined. He wrote:

“Before building a wall, I would ask to know

What was closing or closing. “

That is why we must be careful when we take a quote off the air and paste it on something we are writing. We must not confuse what an author wrote with what he or she believed. It’s so easy to do that when the quote is taken out of context because often it takes a character to say something totally opposite to what the writer believes to create dramatic conflict. So someone (again, who probably never read the original) will quote the character and affirm that the Author held the opinion. Good writing gets a bad rap because people quote, out of context, a character the writer intended as a bad example. Mark Twain Finnish huck it has been branded a racist book due to racist comments from Huck’s father, Pap. In the context of the book, Twain describes Pap as the worst fanatic and despicable person. Twain wasn’t a racist, and neither was the book. Tea character it is, and this is how Twain showed his opposition to racism.

Was Rudyard Kipling racist or xenophobic because he wrote: “East is East and West is West and the two will never meet?” (Actually, Kipling met Twain in 1889, but that’s another story.) The first and last lines of “The Ballad of East and West” certainly seem to say that. What the uninformed citarist overlooks is that the rest of the poem, and it is long, tells of an Englishman and an Arab becoming blood brothers, which they could do, as Kipling wrote, because “there is no neither east nor west, frontier, nor race, nor birth, when two strong men face each other, even though they come from the ends of the earth. ” If anything, Kipling wants us to understand that people should be judged as individuals and not by race. It is an example of, if I can quote Kipling, “hearing your words twisted by rascals to cheat fools.” What do you think he meant by that?