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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.

Arsenal
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  • Where on Facebook? – Brythan Feb 11 '18 at 22:23
  • @Brythan it was part of [Spasseshalber](https://www.facebook.com/Spasseshalber/) a page with jokes, but it is rather widespread if you search for it. – Arsenal Feb 11 '18 at 22:41
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    Posting a "joke" to the Internet is a good way to start "false news". – GEdgar Feb 11 '18 at 22:54
  • Welcome to the site. The question needs to include a notable source for the claim, some widely read source that asserts (not as an obvious joke) that he actually said this. A Facebook group isn't enough. – Nate Eldredge Feb 11 '18 at 23:35
  • @NateEldredge thank you - I'm afraid I cannot find a source which would qualify as notable then. So this question should probably be closed. I've seen other questions like this, so I thought it would be okay. – Arsenal Feb 12 '18 at 00:30
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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: http://www.fischbild.de/wordpress/der-hauptgrund-fuer-stress-ist-der-taegliche-kontakt-mit-idioten-albert-einstein-zitat/ . 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. – Andrew Grimm Feb 12 '18 at 00:55
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    Does a [product you can buy on Amazon](https://www.amazon.de/Albert-Einstein-Hauptgrund-Idioten-Blechschild/dp/B074PSDBH7) count as a notable source? And then there is this [blog entry](http://www.diemitdemrotenlippenstift.com/lifehacks-fuer-den-umgang-mit-idioten/), but that blog has a lower Alexa score than my own - so probably not very notable either. – Arsenal Feb 12 '18 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: https://www.arsenal-of-wisdom.org/?p=964 – tsttst Feb 18 '18 at 02:16

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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

Uli Herrmann
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