Mythquotations: Did They Say That?

Myths have a way of persisting, even after they’ve been proven false. For example, one so-called rule of “proper” English writing is that sentences should never end with a preposition. Well, it’s not a rule; it’s a myth. No reputable guide to English writing supports it. It’s been debunked many times, yet it persists in misleading writers into building clumsy, unnatural-sounding sentences. Perhaps the most famous debunker of this myth was Winston Churchill, a master of crafting superb English sentences. After an editor had “corrected” one of Churchill’s books by revising all the sentence-ending prepositions, Churchill wrote back, “This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.” Churchill’s response has all the elements of a great story—it’s pithy, funny, and sarcastic. Unfortunately, it never happened. It too is a myth. Yet countless books on English writing repeat what Churchill supposedly wrote [1]. Myths persist, as do mythical quotations, about which this article is.

“Mythquotations” are often repeated by well-meaning writers unaware that the famous people they are quoting probably never said the quoted statement. Lest you think I’m being all high and mighty about this, I confess to having fallen more than once into the mythquotation trap. Most embarrassingly, in my book about writing I wrote the following about the word very: “I just happen to have Mark Twain here to back me up: ‘Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.’” I thought it was a nice joke, recalling Woody Allen’s Marshal McLuhan gag in Annie Hall, and it illustrated an important point. Just one problem: As I later learned, Twain most likely never said any such thing about very. I believed the source where I found the quote because it sounded like something Twain would have said. [2]

That’s what happens with many mythquotations: They sound like what some famous person would have said, and over time they become attached to that person. And certain famous people, such as Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Benjamin Franklin, along with the King James Bible, are like magnets that attract quotes of uncertain origin.

Sometimes, the origin of a quote can be quite murky. A famous example: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” The earliest documented use of this statement (or at least something close to it) is in a 1657 letter (in French) by the mathematician Blaise Pascal. Numerous later writers, including John Locke, Henry David Thoreau, and quotation magnets Twain and Franklin wrote versions of the statement; whether they were repeating what they had read elsewhere or were independently inventing something clever may never be known. The Roman orator Cicero and the German theologian Martin Luther may have made the statement before Pascal, but this is based on references in books written hundreds of years after Cicero and Luther died.

Fortunately, many of the quotation magnets have authoritative collections of their written and spoken words. Albert Einstein, for example, has the Princeton University Press’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. Thus, we can be fairly certain he never said or wrote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” [3]. Of course, we can’t be 100% sure he never said it; for all we know, he may have sung it in the shower. But researchers have not found any evidence that he said or wrote the statement.

Sometimes a quotation is correctly attributed to a famous person, but what gets lost is that the famous person never claimed to have originated the statement. For example, Mark Twain actually said, “Wagner’s music, I have been informed, is really much better than it sounds,” and because it’s something that sounds like what Twain would have said, everyone ignores that he preceded his statement with “Bill Nye said” [4].

Many quotations are attributed to the wrong person so often, in print and online, that the misattributions sound authoritative just by the number of references. For example, type “Winston Churchill preposition quote” in Google and you’ll find far more sites that repeat the myth than debunk it [5].

Another form of mythquotation is what Ralph Keyes calls bumper-stickering, in which an actual quotation is revised over time into a shorter, pithier, and, well, more quotable quotation. For example, Churchill (again) is often credited with saying, “blood, sweat, and tears.” Close, but no cigar (as Churchill, an avid cigar smoker, might have said, but probably didn’t). What he actually said was “I have nothing to offer but blood and toil, tears and sweat.” Not nearly as catchy, and certainly not a good name for a rock band [6].

Mythquotations can also result from a distortion of an actual quote that changes its meaning. For example, in 1946, Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher was asked by a sportswriter, “Why can’t you be a nice guy?” Durocher pointed to his opposing team, the New York Giants, and said something like, “Look over there. … Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world. And where are they? In seventh place. Nice guys! I’m not a nice guy, and I’m in first place.” In other words, he was talking about a specific team, which happened to consist of nice guys, but wasn’t in first place. He wasn’t expressing a general philosophy of life, as the often-repeated mythquotation “Nice guys finish last” would suggest. [7]

Not all famous quotations are myths. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright did say, “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines” [8]. And speaking of architecture, Winston Churchill (we keep coming back to him) actually said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” in a 1943 address to the House of Commons.

However, even actual quotations can be a form of mythquotation when taken out of context. An example of this is by Isaac Newton. In a 1676 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, he wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” (The ye was a common way of writing “the” back then.) This statement is typically used to demonstrate Newton’s humility and his acknowledgement of his predecessors’ accomplishments. Two problems with that interpretation: (1) Newton wasn’t humble, and (2) Hooke was the first of a series of scientists with whom Newton engaged in bitter feuds until the days they died (the other scientists, that is—Newton outlived them all). As it happened, Hooke was somewhat deformed physically and walked bent over, so he looked much shorter than he was. By preceding his famous quotation with the words, “You [Hooke] have added much several ways,” Newton was comparing Hooke sarcastically with giants, and implying that if Newton did stand on the shoulders of giants, those giants did not include Hooke. All of Newton’s and Hooke’s peers understood Newton’s insult.

One thing should be mentioned: Just because a clever and quotable statement wasn’t said by a famous person doesn’t mean it’s not clever or quotable. Einstein may never have defined insanity, but “his” definition is still a good one.

How can we determine if a quote is valid? Few of us have the ability (or the time) to track a quote to its source, so we need resources we can trust. Here are a few I rely on:

·      Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations organizes its quotations by author (at least in the Kindle version), and only includes quotations it has verified, so it won’t tell you if a quote is not by a particular author.

·      Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Quotations organizes its quotations by subject, making it somewhat more useful, but it doesn’t talk about quotations of suspect origin.

·      Ralph Keyes’s book The Quote Verifier organizes its quotations by subject, and tries to verify the source of each. It has sections devoted to specific quotation magnets, or what Keyes calls “flypaper people.” He also gives this useful piece of advice: “It is generally safe to assume that when two parties are thought to have said something, the lesser-known party said it first.”

·      The book They Never Said It, by Paul Boller and John George, debunks several hundred famous mythquotations.

·      The Internet Movie Database includes thousands of lines of dialogue from movies. So far, I’ve found it reliable. [9]

·      David Crystal’s book Begat: The King James Bible & the English Language verifies (or not) 260 well-known quotations from the most famous (and quotable) version of the Bible. [10]

·      Garson O’Toole’s book Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, and his website, The Quote Investigator [11], verify or debunk hundreds of quotations. His research seems thorough and he identifies all his sources.  

This article’s take-away is simple: To quote The X-Files, “Trust no one” [12]. If you plan on quoting someone, particularly someone famous, do your best to verify the quotation. Verification takes more effort, but who said writing is easy? Probably no one, but don’t quote me on that.

Follow the author on Twitter @bill_schmwil.

Footnotes:

[1] A tip-off that Churchill never made the statement is the many variations of the quotation. Another version I’ve encountered: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

[2] To the nitpickers out there who insist that quote can only be a verb, and that the noun is quotation, I say, chill out. Quote as a noun is accepted for all but the most formal uses by such authorities as the Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries and Garner’s Modern English Usage, and is an example of English’s flexibility. Older verbs-turned-into-nouns that no one cares about anymore are regret (verb: late 1300s; noun: 1530s) and talk (verb: early 1200s; noun: late 1400s). Another old example that has taken on new life in the digital age is invite (verb: 1530s; noun: 1650s); most nitpickers probably hate it as well.

[3] The website Quote Investigator traces this statement to a pamphlet published by Narcotics Anonymous in 1981, 26 years after Einstein died.

[4] That’s Bill Nye the 19th-century newspaper guy, not Bill Nye the Science Guy.

[5] In this case, despite seeing the Churchill quote in at least a dozen books on writing, I resisted the temptation to use it in my own book, not because I suspected it might be a mythquotation (I learned this later), but because I was tired of reading about it.

[6] For you youngsters, Blood, Sweat & Tears was a jazz-infused rock band popular in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

[7] Many years later, Durocher claimed he had said, “Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” In his version, which should be taken with a large grain of salt, the last two sentences were combined to change the quote’s meaning.

[8] Quote Investigator traced it to a 1931 published lecture of Wright’s. Bartlett’s also credits Wright with the quotation, but claims it was published in the New York Times Magazine on October 4, 1953. Given the likelihood that Wright often repeated his most witty statements, I suspect both sources are correct, but that QI has found the earliest known instance.

[9] IMDB debunks many well-known movie mythquotations. For example, in the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the character Gold Hat doesn’t say, “We don’t need no stinking badges.” Instead, what he says is, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.”

[10] Crystal confirms many King James Bible quotes, such as “How the mighty have fallen,” “Be fruitful and multiply,” “the skin of our teeth,” and “Woe is me.” On the other hand, he finds many mythquotations, such as “Pride goes before a fall,” “The writing is on the wall,” “Faith can move mountains,” and “Cast the first stone” (in each case, the KJB expresses the meaning of these mythquotations, but with somewhat different wording).

[11] https://quoteinvestigator.com

[12] Which, according to the Internet Movie Database, is an actual X-Files quote.