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| - The alleged quotation paraphrased a longer excerpt from one of Carlin's comedy specials. Although the quote being shared on social media wasn't verbatim, its meaning and content were still more or less the same.
For years, social media users have shared a quote purportedly attributed to George Carlin, the American comedian who died in 2008. The passage read: "Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything."
For example, a May 2020 Reddit post featuring the quote in a meme had garnered more than 3,100 upvotes as of this writing. A similar post from 2022 received 1,900 upvotes.
The quote also appeared in numerous posts on other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and X, and it was attributed to Carlin on Goodreads.
The quotation could be traced back to Carlin. However, it paraphrased a statement Carlin made in a comedy special, rather than directly quoting him.
The earliest appearance of the verbatim quotation appeared to come from an X post by the account @TheGeorgeCarlin on April 2, 2013, five years after his death. According to the account's bio: "This is the official George Carlin Twitter, managed by Kelly Carlin and the estate of George Carlin." Kelly Carlin, a writer and podcaster, is the late comedian's daughter.
The exact phrasing of this post, however, could not be found in any published writing or recorded performances from before Carlin died in June 2008.
Instead, evidence suggested the 2013 X post paraphrased an authentic statement by Carlin, as identified in a 2021 post on GeorgeCarlin.net. That website, according to its Frequently Asked Questions page, was created "to address and correct the many, many written pieces on the internet that have been falsely attributed to George Carlin, and still continue to be falsely attributed to him to this day." The website's creator, who identified himself only as Bill, noted in the same FAQ section that he had no affiliation with Carlin's estate.
According to the GeorgeCarlin.net post, the original source for the paraphrased quote was "It's Bad for Ya," an HBO comedy special that aired live in March 2008, just months before Carlin's death. The special also was released as an album that year.
In a recording of the special uploaded to YouTube in 2022, Carlin delivered the full quote starting around the 50:04 timestamp.
As delivered by Carlin in the recording, the full version of the quote was as follows:
[It's] not important to get children to read. Children who wanna read are gonna read. Kids who want to learn to read are going to learn to read. [It's] much more important to teach children to question what they read. Children should be taught to question everything. To question everything they read, everything they hear.
Snopes approached the Carlin estate for confirmation that the 2013 X post paraphrased the comedian's longer statement from the 2008 comedy special. This article will be updated if they respond.
However, given the paraphrased quote was so close to the original, and that the meaning and content remained more or less the same, we rated this claim "Mostly True."
This isn't the first quote attributed to Carlin that Snopes has investigated. Previously, we looked into the claim the comedian once said: "Instead of giving kids participation trophies, teach them activities where the result is the reward."
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