Answer: This one comes from a newspaperman or Shakespeare, depending on your point of view. Quotations on the Web can be maddening, because of the many variations and uncertain sourcing. (If you believe the Web, Mark Twain said everything except part of what's in the Bible.)
Yes, "politics makes strange bedfellows," but the phrase is much older. The earliest reference seems to come from Shakespeare. Trinculo, a jester, says in the "The Tempest," "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." (Act 2, Scene 2)
The politics maxim seems to be correctly ascribed to Charles Dudley Warner, a Connecticut newspaperman. Warner was also a neighbor of Mark Twain, and his collaborator on "The Gilded Age." Many of Warner's best lines are falsely attributed to Twain, including "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."
How do I find that? Step 1: Fortunately, this is an old saying and common, so you can look it up in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The original Bartlett's is now online at Bartleby.com; search for bedfellows. But this Bartlett doesn't tell you which character says the words, or in what context. So you need the full text of Shakespeare's plays.
Step 2: Many people have put Shakespeare online, because he is free of copyright protection. Search in the Yahoo directory for Shakespeare and search and you'll find a good Shakespeare search engine. Search there for bedfellows and you find -- oops, nothing! -- but it's found by bed-fellows.
Step 3: Now, on to politics. AltaVista shows about 9,982 references to "strange bedfellows." That number includes 347 references to "politics makes strange bedfellows" and 98 more with a different subject-verb agreement: "politics make strange bedfellows." That's too many to plow through. We can play some hunches -- "mark twain" and "strange bedfellows" or teddy roosevelt... -- but they don't seem to help.
Step 4: So a bit of search engine syntax and guesswork may help. On AltaVista's advanced search page, title:quot* and "politics makes strange bedfellows" limits our search to pages with some form of "quote" or "quotation" in the title, and the full saying anywhere on the page. In other words, it finds our target in the context of pages that are discussing famous quotations. That yields pages that include quotations attributed (correctly or not) to Twain, including ours, and cite Charles Dudley Warner.
Step 5: Now we use what we know. A search for "charles dudley warner" and "politics makes strange bedfellows" finds a few more references. Are we 100 percent sure? No. But we are gathering steam. And one of the pages gives a concrete reference to go on: Charles Dudley Warner, "My Summer in a Garden," Ch 15., 1871. Now we're headed for the library to find that book.
If you need to take a refresher course in Web searching, try the tutorial.
Comment: This is one area where books are definitely better for getting the fine points right. Except that I don't have a copy of the works of Charles Dudley Warner on my shelf.
How do I know this is right? Well, I'm certain about the Shakespeare, because the full text of his works are widely available. Sometimes you can find the same quote, attributed to the same person, in the same form, so many times that you feel satisfied that you have it right. It's in those cases that you get letters.
How do I attribute this? If you find it in a respected source, you can merely cite Shakespeare, without citing Bartlett's. For quotes in general, when in doubt, cite Mark Twain.
Go on to Question 6
A primer on Web searching is available at http://PowerReporting.com/altavista.html.
You can reach Bill Dedman by e-mail at Bill@PowerReporting.com.
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