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There is this quote floating around (got it via Facebook) attributed to Albert Einstein:

„Der Hauptgrund für Stress ist der tägliche Kontakt mit Idioten.“

Which I would translate to:

The main reason for stress is the daily contact with idiots.

Now it struck me rather odd that he would have said that, and doing a short research I couldn't find a quote with a source.

So I fired up Google Trends and there is a sudden rise in August 2016, before that date the words I would search that quote with have almost no hits. "Einstein Stress" produces results because there is the stress energy tensor in English.

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  • Where on Facebook?
    – Brythan
    Feb 11, 2018 at 22:23
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    Posting a "joke" to the Internet is a good way to start "false news".
    – GEdgar
    Feb 11, 2018 at 22:54
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    I’ve found a non-English page that seems to mention this though I haven’t tried running it through google translate to see if it’s talking about this quote, or to see how notable the example is: fischbild.de/wordpress/… . Ironically, the biggest problem I had, while googling for Einstein idiots, was another bogus Einstein quote about technology making us idiots, which was rather self-fulfilling.
    – Golden Cuy
    Feb 12, 2018 at 0:55
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    Does a product you can buy on Amazon count as a notable source? And then there is this blog entry, but that blog has a lower Alexa score than my own - so probably not very notable either.
    – Arsenal
    Feb 12, 2018 at 11:33
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    the following German blog strongly suggests (based on google n-grams) that Einstein didn't say the above phrase: arsenal-of-wisdom.org/?p=964
    – tsttst
    Feb 18, 2018 at 2:16

1 Answer 1

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Bad news: it is most likely not. There are first references 2005 and "Einstein" was associated with about 3 years later and even used on book covers. It never was found in any of Einstein's digitized texts or work of references.

I also came here through google when searching for this quote and also found a blog about false quotes (use Translator for German) http://falschzitate.blogspot.com/2018/12/der-hauptgrund-fur-stress-ist-der.html

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    I don't know how this is bad news, thanks for that link, which I hadn't found.
    – Arsenal
    Dec 24, 2018 at 20:03
  • I liked the idea he said this :-) Dec 25, 2018 at 21:20

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