son of witless wrote:
It would have been so much simpler and more elegant if you had merely quoted Harry S. Truman directly. " If you can't convince them, confuse them. " or attributed your quote “ If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. ” to W.C. Fields.
Your paraphrasing in this case, yes is technically correct, but rather clumsy. Akin to swatting flies with a tennis racket.
Maybe, but in not recalling offhand the exact quote by Truman, I went with a paraphrase and labeled it as such. The important thing was that I presented it as a paraphrase, without full quotation marks ("). The two quotes are quite similar in meaning, yet Fields was simply more colorful. Also, as Wiktionary declared, though Fields is given credit, the quote attributed to him is of unknown origin.
Rein in your ego and have a nice weekend, SOW.