..except that he didn't. What he actually wrote was (one translation):
"Behind a great success for which there is no obvious source is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed."
Bear in mind this is a translation from 19th century french to modern english, so there's a lot of wiggle room for getting different meanings.
The common, shorter version that is bandied about on the internet drops the important qualifier "success which there is no obvious source for" - in other words, there's only a crime behind a success that has no apparent reason.
Also keep in context that this was written ~7 years before the French revolution, about French society. People should keep that in mind when applying that to modern situations.
In Facebook's example, I'm sure most will agree the reason for the success is pretty apparent, and thus no 'great crime' was committed.
well, nitpick comments usually tend to get downvoted but this is one of those examples where I thought people would be genuinely interested in the background. It's not intended to be a putdown, more of a 'did you know...'
I could fill a whole website with mis-attributed, mistranslated and misrepresented popular quotes. Poor old Einstein has got a lot floating around that he never said.
