Compendium of Fake Tech and Wonder Quotes

[CaiusDrewart]

OK, so this is one of the game's two quotes for cartography: "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a cartographer." It's attributed to John Quincy Adams.

I found this quote rather amusing, but then it didn't seem like something from the early 19th century. So I googled it. And it's totally fake. It's more than that, actually; it's an ironic changing of an already fake quote.

The quote "if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a leader" has often been attributed to John Quincy Adams. But he almost certainly did not say this; and anyone who thinks about it will probably admit that this quote sounds like something a 21st century motivational speaker would say, not a 19th century US president.

So how does cartography come in? Well, a cartography blogger decided to have some fun and wrote a post changing famous quotes to make them actually about cartography. That included substituting "cartographer" for "leader" in that already-fake John Adams quote! (The post also included the famous Kennedy quote "Ask not what OpenStreetMap can do for you; ask what you can do for OpenStreetMap.")

Then some Firaxis employee must have googled "cartography quotes" and found that blog post--it's on the first page of results. No one read the blog post carefully enough to see that it was a joke, and no one bothered to spend thirty seconds on google verifying the accuracy of the quote, and the upshot is that this doubly fake quote made it into Civ VI.

I realize tech quotes don't matter much to some people, but I've always liked the flavor they added to the game. That is, until Civ VI totally botched it. Firaxis--the quality of the tech quotes is completely unacceptable. Please re-do them.

 

[AriochIV]

I think most of the quotes are pretty good, and having multiple versions is something I find very welcome. The quote in question did strike me as odd, so I'm not surprised it's an error... but I doubt it will be fixed. They'd have to haul a fairly well-known actor back in to the studio to record the correction, and that's not an insignificant cost to fix a pretty minor thing.

The notion that all the quotes must be re-done because of this one error is ludicrous.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

I think most of the quotes are pretty good, and having multiple versions is something I find very welcome. The quote in question did strike me as odd, so I'm not surprised it's an error... but I doubt it will be fixed. They'd have to haul a fairly well-known actor back in to the studio to record the correction, and that's not an insignificant cost to fix a pretty minor thing.

The notion that all the quotes must be re-done because of this one error is ludicrous.

Personally, I hate ~90% of the game's quotes, and I'd love to see them changed. I've done some digging and I'm very confident that a great many (perhaps half) of the Civ tech quotes were gotten simply by googling "[tech name] quote" and taking the first result that seemed reasonable. This was a really lazy effort. But I understand that some people like the flippant tone; that's fine. To each their own.

But anyway, at the very least, they could delete this inaccurate quote and just have one quote for Cartography. Or change the attribution so that it is correctly attributed to cartography blogger Gretchen Peterson, not US president John Quincy Adams. I understand that mistakes happen, but I don't think they should knowingly keep bad quotes in the game. Civ shouldn't spread misinformation like that. The truth is worth something!

 

[qadams]

Personally, I hate ~90% of the game's quotes, and I'd love to see them changed. I've done some digging and I'm very confident that a great many (perhaps half) of the Civ tech quotes were gotten simply by googling "[tech name] quote" and taking the first result that seemed reasonable. This was a really lazy effort. But I understand that some people like the flippant tone; that's fine. To each their own.

But anyway, at the very least, they could delete this inaccurate quote and just have one quote for Cartography. Or change the attribution so that it is correctly attributed to cartography blogger Gretchen Peterson, not US president John Quincy Adams. I understand that mistakes happen, but I don't think they should knowingly keep bad quotes in the game. Civ shouldn't spread misinformation like that. The truth is worth something!

I agree that a lot of the quotes are very bad — at least half of them, if not more. I mean, Marie Osmond, come on!

I seriously doubt that Firaxis will pay to fix them now, however, but it's a dang shame they didn't put more effort into it in the first place. Seems like they just assigned an intern to do some googling for maybe an hour or two, and that was it.

 

[topresch]

That's some fine investigating and untangling by OP. Love when factoids get debunked! Strange that it made it all the way into Civ 6 without any decent fact-checking.

 

[Mustakrakish]

Mind blown.

 

[Jabulani]

Roughly 90% of the quotes are silly or stupid, who have chosen them Ed ?

 

[WillowBrook]

Nice sleuthing! Unlike many others, I have no issues with most of the quotes, but misattributions like this should be corrected.

 

[jbavon]

The Albert Einstein quote is fake as well. Correct?

 

[CaiusDrewart]

The Albert Einstein quote is fake as well. Correct?

Yes, the Einstein quote about him wanting to be a watchmaker is also inaccurate--though that one appears to just be a major distortion of something Einstein actually said, whereas this cartography one was conjured out of thin air. Neither should be in the game.

There are plenty of other problems, too-- for instance, people have pointed out that Space Race quote about the Russians using pencils is simply flat-out wrong.

 

[Victoria]

When I first saw them I knew they were having a laugh. They just had to be, I mean some are just crrrrrazy

 

[Horizons]

The quotes for this game are lame. It's almost as if they rushed them out in time to get the script to Sean Bean. But we all know Civ6 wasn't a rushjob

 

[shadowplay]

A lot of the quotes are sucky. Lorne Michaels?

 

[demidyad]

Honestly feel a kind of second-hand embarrassment for Sean Bean with some of the quotes. He must have been gritting his teeth through some of them. I think it's all but proven that they really did just get some intern to google "cartography quotes" "mining quotes" "mount kilimanjaro quotes" the day before he turned up at the studio

 

[Mr. Shadows]

The quotes are a complete disaster. I've been making it a point to be positive but there's no excuse for this; it's no harder to code an interesting quote than it is the drivel they gave us.

 

[shadowplay]

The quotes are a complete disaster.

We're going to make the quotes great again.

 

[Ryika]

I still love how this blogpost is the source of the Mt. Kilimanjaro quote.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

By the way, people have dug up some other false quotes. There's no evidence Churchill ever said "however beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." And the George Carlin quote "may the forces of evil become confused while your arrow is on its way to the target" is also made up. George Carlin said "may the forces of evil become confused while on the way to your house."

Oh, and Aristotle never wrote "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." A nice sentiment, but not Aristotle. He actually wrote, "It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits," which is a completely different sentiment.

Are you starting to see why I think the tech quotes should be completely re-done?

 

[Krajzen]

There were like half a dozen posts on civ reddit main page attacking tech quotes, and they were all deserved.

Tech quotes are ridiculously bad. Misattributed stuff, wrongly typed stuff, completely false stuff, urban legend lies, mood-ruining smugness ("Mysticism? Superstitious nonsense, haha, see how we ironically laugh from your peoples advancement"), inappropriate terrible jokes, modern era goddamn comedians joking from ancient tehnologies...

Firaxis, why on Earth do you sink a lot of cash in Sean Bean known for his deadly serious voice, and then give him bad jokes to tell terrible random quotes from Google which ruin the mood?

Who on Earth in Firaxis decided that the best quote for Ruhr Vallery wonder, wonder which upon finished construction should feel like the great accomplishment, is basically "this thing has failed and we are worse after building it"???

Why no effort at all, just extremely lazy googling?
I wouldn't be so angry at that nitpicky stuff if tech quotes were something completely ignored by devs, but they didn't do that - they put them in the spotlight (with grand Sean Bean announcement) and then ruined them.

Although they made similar ridiculous fail with bragging about and displaying AI battle royale which showed the catastrophic state of AI.

Something wrong happened to this company, as if it grew too big and arrogant and different departments barely had communication with each other.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

Civ VI is just brimming with fake tech quotes. I thought it would be useful to gather them all into one place, for three reasons: first, for my amusement; second, so that Civ players won't be misinformed by their own game; and third, so that Firaxis might be shamed into re-doing the quotes.

Entirely fictitious quotes

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a cartographer." --John Quincy Adams.

John Quincy Adams never said this or anything remotely like it.

"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return." --Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci never said this. It appears to have originated in 1970s science fiction. (NB: Civ IV incorrectly used this quote as well.)

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." --Winston Churchill.

Churchill probably never said this.

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." --George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw probably never said this.

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uniformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed." --Mark Twain.

Twain probably never said this.

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." --Albert Einstein.

Einstein probably never said this.

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." --Albert Einstein.

Einstein did lament the spread of atomic weaponry, but he never said this.


Substantially altered quotes

"May the forces of evil become confused while your arrow is on its way to the target." --George Carlin.

George Carlin said "may the forces of evil become confused while on the way to your house." He said nothing about archery. Like the John Quincy Adams cartography "quote," this one originated as a blogger's joke.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle.

Aristotle actually wrote "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits," which does not mean the same thing at all.


Slightly misworded quotes

"I like pigs. Dogs look up at us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." --Winston Churchill.

The sentiment is accurate, but the wording isn't. Churchill probably said, "Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal."


Deeply misleading or otherwise problematic quotes

"NASA spent millions of dollars inventing the ball-point pen so they could write in space. The Russians took a pencil." --Will Chabot.

This quote is misleading for three reasons: first, the space pen was privately developed; second, the space pen is actually extremely useful, because graphite is flammable and dangerous to have aboard a spaceship; and third, the Russians switched to using a space pen themselves as soon as they could.

"King Solomon gave the Queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for; besides what he had given her out of his royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants." - 1 Kings, 10:13

This quote is for the Great Zimbabwe wonder. Insofar as it relates to the Great Zimbabwe at all, it appears to refer to the 19th century theory that an expedition of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was responsible for constructing the Great Zimbabwe. This is a completely racist and unsubstantiated idea that only arose because some racist European scholars could not believe that Africans could have accomplished such impressive architectural feats. Why Civilization decided to include a nod to this racist drivel, I have no idea.


This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you're able to find any other fake tech quotes--and I'm very confident more are out there--please share it in the replies! I will update the main thread accordingly.

EDIT: User Arui_Kashiwagi's excellent research has identified further mistakes in the quotes for Wheel, Stirrups, Banking, Astronomy, Guidance Systems, Foreign Trade, and Natural History. See this post.