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). | 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. | W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1949), entry for 1901