There are these sentences that everyone knows. No wonder they still influence our view of the world today. But hardly anyone knows where they come from, how they were originally meant - and what happened to them over the course of time. Famous quotations are often like literary figures: just as they escape their books of origin, they leave their contexts of origin and take on a life of their own as they wander through people's minds for centuries. Some become fat with meanings they didn't originally have, while others become thin to the point of insignificance.Sometimes this does little harm, as with the assertion that there is no accounting for taste; but the consequences can also be extremely disastrous, as with Darwin's "survival of the fittest"; sometimes a sentence is foisted on an author, even though he never wrote it. Who wrote "Back to Nature" ...? Preisendörfer repeatedly throws elegant hooks into the curious and unexpected. In this way, his book becomes an educational and entertaining marvel somewhere between a philosophical handbook, a historical panopticon and a contemporary diagnostic essay.