Si 50 millions de personnes disent une bêtise, c'est quand même une bêtise.
• Derived variant: If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie." - Meaning and context.">
QuotesCosmos
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
 • As quoted in Listening and Speaking : A Guide to Effective Oral Communication (1954) by Ralph G. Nichols and Thomas R. Lewis, p. 74
  • Also misattributed to Bertrand Russell, by Laurence J. Peter, in The Peter Prescription : How To Make Things Go Right (1976), but he subsequently attributed to France in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977).
      • W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1949), entry for 1901
“

Si 50 millions de personnes disent une bêtise, c'est quand même une bêtise.
• Derived variant: If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.

— Anatole France

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Si 50 millions de personnes disent une bêtise, c'est quand même une bêtise.
• Derived variant: If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie." in the context of "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
 • As quoted in Listening and Speaking : A Guide to Effective Oral Communication (1954) by Ralph G. Nichols and Thomas R. Lewis, p. 74
  • Also misattributed to Bertrand Russell, by Laurence J. Peter, in The Peter Prescription : How To Make Things Go Right (1976), but he subsequently attributed to France in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977).
      • W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1949), entry for 1901" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Anatole France" (Quotes) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

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Anatole France

About Anatole France

Anatole France (16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924), born Jacques Anatole François Thibault, was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. A member of the Académie française, he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his literary achievements. He is widely believed to be the model for the narrator's literary idol "Bergotte" in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.