[WT Sharpe]

I read the entire 1884 Birmingham speech ("On Democracy") by James Russell Lowell last night and discovered something remarkable: the quotation ("The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.") wasn't in there! Being as how I had typed it by hand into a Word document in the days before OCR scanners were commonplace, I returned to my source to see if I had mistyped, but no, I hadn't. It's sourced to that speech in The Great Thoughts by George Seldes (1985, Introduction and a new compilation © 1996 by David Laskin). George Seldes died on July 2, 1995, and the updated version with a new compilation by David Laskin wasn't released until May 21, 1996, so thinking that his heir to the throne may have not been as meticulous in his research as Seldes, I got out my copy of the older Seldes book, The Great Quotations (1961), for comparison; and in this one he credits the quote correctly to Lowell's book My Study Windows (1871). This was confirmed by a quick peek at the Google Book version which revealed the quote to be present on page 166 of that work.

Sorry folks. I trusted a secondary source, and that source was incorrect. I have changed the original post accordingly.

Right author, wrong source.

This is how the quote should have been posted:

.....The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
..........— James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), American poet, critic, diplomat. My Study Windows (1871), "Abraham Lincoln," pg. 166.