Citing a quote in a college essay

I'd imagine so. However, like I said upthread, that is proving to be an insurmountable task as no one in this class seems to be interested in helping one another or actually having a discussion about ANYTHING aside from their own personal experience. And the only apparent reason they do that is to meet the weekly "post 8 substantive messages every week on 3 separate days" quota for participation credit. Homework assignments are due every Tuesday at midnight and last weeks still hasn't been touched."Less than impressed, I am" (Yoda, never)

I appreciate all the help, but I could not find a suitable source for the quote. I am now curious how the hell it is actually attributed to him because there is no apparent book or historical record that I can find. All of the university sources I found were simply personal pages for a student or professor that essentially listed it as a neat quote by Aristotle. It was more work than necessary and, like NoNukes pointed out, I'd rather not have my first paper start off with a questionable quote or reference. Instead, i chose a Hitchens quote that is actually in a book."The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks" (Hitchens, C. (2001). Letters To A Young contrarian. New York, NY: Basic Books.)Simple, to the point, and best of all, it's Hitchens.

Aristotle - WikiquoteI note that their attribution is:

quote:

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Attributed to Aristotle in Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth, Deseret Book Company, 1959, p. 52, and in American Opinion, Volume 24, Robert Welch, Inc., 1981, p. 23.

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I know that in the past, I got into a clash of sorts with (I think) Rrhain, to supply a source credit. He gave me what was the original source, which was in a seemingly pretty obscure book or journal.I subsequently tracked the information to a wikipedia source, which in turn credited it to the source Rrhain had given me. Rrhain said he didn't use the wikipedia source link because he deemed wikipedia to be unreliable. But I suspect he found it via wikipedia, and I doubt that he actually saw the original source.OK - I tracked down what I was talking about above, here and upthread: Anyway, in that situation do you cite wikipedia or wikipedia's source (or both)? It doesn't seem proper to me, to cite just wikipedia's source if you haven't actually read it at that source.And I do wish that people would do a lot better at citing their sources in their evcforum.net messages. Not only is it giving proper credit, it's useful if you want to go and read the larger context of the information. Graphics non-attributions tends to especially annoy me. I often would like to read at least some of the article that the graphics was pulled from.Moose