Beam Me Up Scotty / Politics

"For 17 years, I thought I said the word 'strategery'."

— George W. Bush

Argentina

• Eva Perón (Evita) never said "Volveré y seré millones" (I'll come back, and I'll be millions), as many Argentinians believe. It was said instead by the Aymara leader Túpac Catari. A poem by José María Castiñeira de Dios generated the confusion.
• Néstor Kirchner never asked "¿Qué te pasa Clarín, estás nervioso?" (What's wrong Clarín, are you nervous?) in reference to the Clarín newspaper. He got angry with an electoral defeat at Catamarca during the 2009 midterm elections, and blamed Clarín for it. At one point of his speech he said "Clarín, no sé por qué estás tan nervioso" (Clarín, I don't know why are you so nervous). At another point he asked "¿Qué te pasa Clarín?" (What's wrong Clarín?), but only that. The TV comedy "Gran Cuñado", a parody of Big Brother starring parodies of politicians, took both phrases and mixed them toguether for the catchphrase of Kirchner's parody.

Canada

• Brian Mulroney didn't quite say "You had an option, sir, you could have said no" to then-PM John Turner over the latter's appointing hundreds of Liberals to highly-paid government jobs as part of an agreement with previous PM Pierre Trudeau. What he actually said was "You had an option, sir, to say no" and then "You had an option, sir, you could have done better" a few minutes later.
• Kim Campbell didn't say "An election is no time to discuss serious issues", or anything else with that intended meaning. She actually said that the 1993 election campaign would not be long enough to fully discuss the policy reforms that the country needed — in a manner that was a clear stab at Brian Mulroney, who had left her with virtually no time to establish herself as PM before she had to call an election — which a journalist wrote up as that quote.
• While Justin Trudeau has stated that he would cease to bomb the Islamic State (and later on also stated that he wouldn't resume bombing them even if they attacked) so as for Canadians not to be ruled by fear, he never actually said "If you kill your enemies, they win." That was from a 4chan thread that interpreted his statement.

China

• The Qianlong Emperor is often said to have declared "I am a barbarian monarch, not Chinese" by Han nationalists. But there's no documentation to support this.
• Empress Dowager Cixi never said "We would rather give our state to 'neighboring friends' (foreigners), not to our 'household slaves' (Han Chinese)." In fact, it was never attributed to her until the Internet era.
• The song, "Mao Tse Tung Said" by Alabama 3 and the original speeches by the person Alabama 3 sampled, Jim Jones, would have you believe Mao Zedong said "change must come through the barrel of a gun." Mao actually said "Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
• A famous quote by Zhou Enlai is probably the result of a misunderstanding with the translator. He is frequently quoted as saying about the French Revolution (the one of 1789) that it was "too early to tell" what it had meant. However, it is more likely that he understood the question to instead refer to the (then recent) 1968 French protests. And given that they involved a fair number of people who saw themselves as Maoists and/or took inspiration from the "Red Book", it is not unreasonable to assume Zhou was speaking about current events, not making an Ice-Cream Koan statement about early modern history.
• Deng Xiaoping never said, "To get rich is glorious." Another one commonly attributed to him goes, "To get rich is not a sin," which might more accurately reflect his beliefs because under his administration China adopted more capitalist policies, allowing individual citizens to get more wealthy, but it was also under his direction that the Tienanmen Square incident later occurred, quashing demand for further capitalist reforms. Saying something is not evil is not the same thing as saying it is good.

France

• Henry IV, who in 1593 converted to Roman Catholicism (in order to placate the country's Catholic population centered around Paris, who questioned the legitimacy of his throne and were at war with the Protestant Huguenots), is often quoted as justifying the conversion with the cynical observation that "Paris is worth a Mass". However, the quote is generally believed by scholars to be apocryphal.
• "After me, the deluge" is often attributed to Louis XIV and presented as a kind of worried foreshadowing about the future decadence and destruction of the French Bourbon monarchy, further proof of what a clever statesman he was. In reality, it was said years later by Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour (though even this is disputed) and it had the exact opposite meaning: she was trying to convince her lover not to worry after the loss of France's North American colonies following the Seven Years' War, under the reasoning that whatever happened to France after them wouldn't be their business, since they wouldn't be there to see it anyway. It's also a modification of an Ancient Greek proverb that translates loosely as "When I die let earth and fire mix; I don't care, since my business will not be affected".
  • Apres moi, le deluge was also chosen as the squadron motto of the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron, the famous Dambusters, in reference to their famous raid, and they cited Louis XIV as the source. They naturally meant it rather more literally.
  • There is no proof that Louis XIV of France ever said "L'état, c'est moi" (I am the State). Indeed, what he is recording as having said (as his final words, or near as) conveys the precise opposite meaning: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State will remain forever.") (The statements are reconcilable; when he passes, the new king becomes the State. In the French monarchy, the heir becomes king at the instant of the previous king's death, unlike in some other monarchies where the throne is vacant until the next king's coronation. Mind, the new king was five years old...)
• The quote "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", is often attributed to Voltaire, but he never used this himself. Rather, it is a summation of his beliefs by Evelyn Beatrice Hall. (Voltaire would have agreed wholeheartedly, but he never said it.)
  • Voltaire also never quite called Canada "a few acres of snow" (quelques arpents de neige). He did mention (in Candide) that Britain and France were fighting over "a few acres of snow somewhere around Canada" [emphasis added], and in a letter wrote dismissively about "a few acres of ice in Canada", but he never exactly said that Canada itself was "a few acres of snow." This is in part because "Canada" at the time was a vague geographical expression occasionally referring to all of New France, including Louisiana (which itself included the whole Mississippi Basin at the time). That said, Voltaire really was quite dismissive of the value of France's colonies on the North American mainland; he considered their transfer to Britain after the Seven Years' War a good riddance, arguing, against the opinion of many in the French elite, that France should sacrifice Canada to retain control of the more lucrative sugar colonies of the Caribbean. (He was incidentally in agreement with Benjamin Franklin on that point, who argued against the opinion of many in the British elite that Canada would be more useful to Britain than the French sugar colonies seized during that conflict.)
  • Voltaire never said "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize". The quote actually comes from a 1993 essay by Neo-Nazi writer Kevin Alfred Strom, who said "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?", which, for some reason ended up being associated with him.
• Not only did Marie-Antoinette never say "let them eat cake" (Qu'ils mangent de la brioche), she would likely have been horrified by the accusation, as she was deeply involved in charity work for the poor and gave a significant portion of her income to feed them (more than the rest of the French royal family combined). French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that a "great princess" said "S'ils n'ont plus de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche", commonly translated as "If they have no bread, let them eat cake", when told peasants were starving, but wrote this in 1765, five years before Marie Antoinette married into the French royal family—and besides, Rousseau died well before The French Revolution (in 1778). The quote may have satirised Marie Leszczyńska, wife of Louis XV, or perhaps the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, before it was transferred to Marie Antoinette (Maria Theresa's daughter). Note that brioche is not really cake but a rich variety of bread with a higher egg and butter content than normal bread.
• Louis Antoine de Saint-Just never said at the trial of Louis XVI, "A King must reign or die", he said "This man must reign or die."
• A famous quote from the French Revolution is "Terror is the order of the day!" or "Make Terror the order of the day!", and is often attributed to Georges Danton, or sometimes Maximilien Robespierre. The actual quote is "So legislators, place Terror on the order of the day!" and it is a proclamation by the National Convention (the revolutionary parliament) as a whole, not any particular individual.
• Jean-Paul Marat never demanded "100,000 heads", despite routinely being portrayed as doing so in fictionalized portrayals of the French Revolution, most notably 1989's La Revolution Française. He did routinely call for beheadings, but the 100,000 figure actually comes from his assassin, Charlotte Corday, who proclaimed that she had killed "one man to save 100,000."
• Talleyrand never said C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute ("It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake"). While it accurately reflects his pragmatic worldview, the statement is best attributed either to a legislative deputy or to Joseph Fouché (Talleyrand's colleague in Napoleon's cabinet—he served as Police Minister while Talleyrand was Foreign Minister—and a fellow pragmatist).
• François Guizot famously said "Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head." (referring to mid-19th century French republicanism) It's been often changed to conservative/liberal or communist/capitalist, and attributed to many, including Otto von Bismarck and Winston Churchill (very unlikely, as Churchill crossed from Conservative to Liberal aged 30, then went back to the Conservative Party aged 50).
  • It is true, however, that Vladimir Putin paraphrased it as "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants to restore it back as it was has no brain."
• The quote "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." is frequently misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville. In reality, it's a modification of a quote by Alexander Fraser Tytler. There's no evidence that de Tocqueville ever said anything of the sort.
• Georges Clemenceau never said "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." This was actually said by Charles de Gaulle on leaving his presidency in 1969. As for Clemenceau himself, it's not clear how he would've come down on this. Yes, he was a famous revanchiste who reveled in extracting as much humiliation from Germany as he could at the end of World War I, but outside of his specific desire to avenge the losses of the Franco-Prussian War he doesn't seem to have hated foreigners (disdain, yes, hate, no), and actually attacked French imperial ambitions as a distraction from the project of getting the Germans back for 1870.

Germany

• The famous quote "Audacity, audacity, always audacity!" is frequently attributed to Frederick the Great. But it's actually a paraphrase of a line from one of Georges Danton's speeches.
• The disaster of the Prussian Army at the 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstadt had been quoted by historians as "Napoleon / The Emperor whistled and Prussia was no more", or "Napoleon / The Emperor blew with his breath and Prussian military might was no more", supposedly in reference to how German poet Heinrich Heine described the event. Actually Heine, then a 9-year old kid, saw Napoleon riding triumphantly into Düsseldorf after the battle and years later wrote: "Everyone knew The Emperor's lips had only to whistle and Prussia would cease to exist."
• Karl Marx never actually said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." The correct quote is "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
  • Not to mention that opium was more than an addictive and dangerous drug — it was the source of fantastic visions of the "opium eaters", a painkiller used in medicine, and a treatment for cholera.
  • Arguably, "opiate of the masses" is just another way to translate Marx's German phrase „das Opium des Volkes“, so it's arguable that Marx's remarks have been shortened and Quote Mined rather than outright misquoted. His intended meaning is almost always misinterpreted in a Strawman Political way, though, and as his full remarks provide context that usually gets elided, the shortened version can still be considered misleading, particularly to modern audiences. It's also worth noting that Marx was arguing that when suffering was eliminated, religion would wither away, not that religion should be forcibly outlawed.
• Otto von Bismarck is said to have said "To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making." The earliest such quote is in 1869 by John Godfrey Saxe, who said, "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." It may have not been attributed to Bismarck before 1930.
  • Bismarck also never said, "A language is a dialect with a navy" (to explain, for example, why Spanish and Portuguese are seen as two languages but Tuscan and Sicilian are one). The linguist Max Weinreich or his student Joshua Fishman said in Yiddish, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot - "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
  • A 'Bismarck quote' popularized in Spain after the advent of the internet states that "Spain is the strongest nation in the world. It has tried to destroy itself for centuries without success." Bismarck never made a similar statement. The quote is first documented in a speech by Alfonso Guerra in 1974, where he introduced it as a supposed old saying but didn't attribute it to anyone in particular.
• "Whenever I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver" is probably Hermann Goering's most (in)famous saying. But it actually comes from the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst and first performed for Hitler's birthday in 1933. While Goering might have quoted it, the only senior Nazi actually recorded saying it was Baldur von Schirach, in a speech from 1938, when the play was already well known by the general public. Its original form is "Wenn ich Kultur höre... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" - "When I hear 'culture' ... I remove the safety from my Browning!"
  Note that a Browning is not a revolver, but a magazine-fed semi-automatic pistol^note In German-speaking countries pre- and post World War I, a "Browning" was the general term for an automatic handgun with a slide, regardless being manufactured by Browning or not. The context is important too: the play describes wealthy people going to the theater and talking about culture while a homeless orphan child dies on the snowy street nearby. The quote is a moral of a story. It may have been chosen to pun on the English poet Robert Browning.
• One of the most famous quotes from Nazism and therefore Adolf Hitler goes like "Do you want total war, or do you want total radical war?" The real quote went instead: "Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?", and it comes from Joseph Goebbels' famous Sportpalast speech, not Hitler.
  • Hitler never said, "This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!", and in fact, some aspects of gun laws were actually looser in Nazi Germany than in the Weimar Republic (for Nazi party members anyway; Untermensch like Jews weren't so lucky).
  • Nor did Hitler say, "Who remembers nowadays the Armenians?" in regards to Jews. He actually said in the August 22, 1939 speech: "Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"^note "Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?" and the previous lines made clear he was talking of the Poles.^note "mit dem Befehl, unbarmherzig und mitleidslos Mann, Weib und Kind polnischer Abstammung und Sprache in den Tod zu schicken" - "with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish people and language"
  • Hitler also never said "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." The real author of the quote is Gregor Strasser, who was indeed a Nazi, but along with several others was purged from the party in 1932 and then killed off in 1934 for (among other reasons) being too anti-capitalist.
  • Hitler didn't base his worldview on biological evolution (in fact, the very emphasis on racial purity is contrary to it), nor ever alludes to it or Charles Darwin in Mein Kampf. The only instance of the word "evolution" in Mein Kampf is about the evolution of the German state.
• It is very doubtful that Willy Brandt ever said Jetzt wächst zusammen was zusammen gehört ("Now what belongs together grows together") a now iconic commentary on reunification, either in 1989 or at any later time.
• Helmut Kohl's most famous quote (for the Heh Heh, You Said "X" subtext) Entscheidend ist, was hinten rauskommt ("The crucial thing is what comes out at the end") is commonly quoted wrong as "Am wichtigsten ist..." ("Most important thing is...").

Greece

• Socrates is frequently quoted as complaining that
  The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in lace of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

  However, this quote actually originated from a 1907 paper, intending to summarize common complaints against youth in Ancient Greece. The quote was attributed to Socrates by Gijsbert van Hall, mayor of Amsterdam in the 1960s. There are somewhat similar complaints in Plato and Hesiod, but not the above paragraph.

• "Only the dead have seen the end of war" is often attributed to Plato, but it's actually not recorded before its 1924 use by George Santayana. It's believed to have been been misattributed to Plato by the British Imperial War Museum. The popularity of this misconception within the U.S. military stems from General Douglas MacArthur attributing the quote to Plato during his farewell address at West Point in 1962.

India

• Mahatma Gandhi's last words may have been "Hē Rām" (Hindi: "O Ram", Rama being a god, translated to "Oh God" in the award-winning biopic), or maybe not.
  • Gandhi never said "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win." An American trade union address of 1914 ran "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
  • Scholars have found no evidence that Gandhi actually said "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" or any variation of it. Even if he did, a member of the Canadian House of Parliament had already uttered something along those lines as early as 1914. That said, it's certainly a sentiment he would have agreed with.
  • Likewise, he never said but would have agreed with, "Be the change you want to see in the world."
• Jawaharlal Nehru is frequently said to have described himself by saying "I am English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu merely by accident." But in reality, this was said by the Hindu Mahasabha leader N. B. Khare.

Iran

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was very freely translated as having said, "Israel must be wiped off the face of the map". Whether this translation is accurate depends both on your politics and your command of Farsi, which has a notoriously complicated grammar. Some sources even point to an Iranian source coming up with now well-known English translation. A more literal translation - which employs a lot of flowery rhetoric to avoid saying "Israel" - is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods, Persian: این رژیم اشغالگر قدس‎‎) must [vanish from] the page of time", which also makes the reference to Khomeini (see below) more apparent. Interestingly the original Farsi is actually a quote of Ayatollah Khomeini, so Ahmadinejad may very well have been surprised how an old quote got such a strange new reaction.
  • Whether the different translation actually changes the meaning is debatable. It is worth recalling that people who like Ahmadinejad do not recognize the existence of Israel have to use circumscriptions like "regime" or "Zionist entity" instead of "nation" and that for them by definition there is no Israeli people. On the other hand, that aside, it changes the emphasis in a way similar to the correct translation of Khrushchev's famous quote about burying capitalism: it doesn't say that Iran will destroy Israel, but rather implies that someone else—possibly even the Israelis themselves—will be responsible for ending the Israeli state and Iran will be present for the event.

Ireland

• Charlie Haughey did not refer to the 1982 Malcolm MacArthur case (described more fully here, the upshot of which was that a double-murderer who at that very moment was Ireland's most wanted man was arrested while a houseguest in the home of the Attorney General) as "grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented" (GUBU). Rather, he said, "It was a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance."

Israel

• David Ben-Gurion did not say "I fight, therefore I exist." That line was actually written by German author Leo Wittmayer in a work about the constitution of the Weimar Republic.

Italy

• Niccolò Machiavelli never said, "The ends justify the means", but the far more moderate and reserved (and Magnificent Bastard-ish) "One must consider the final result", as well as "[If the monarch is careful to preserve the State] the means will always be esteemed, honored and applauded by everyone".
  • The Roman poet Ovid wrote in around 10 BC: "Exitus acta probat", which is usually translated as "the ends justify the means."
  • Napoléon Bonaparte popularized it by saying "the ends justifies the means" while trying to quote Machiavelli.
• Benito Mussolini (or his ghostwriter, philosopher Giovanni Gentile) never said that fascism was "the merging of the state and corporate power" (or, in some versions, "the corporation") and that it was more accurately called "corporatism" - meaning that big business was in control of the state. In fact, according to Snopes, while something called "corporatism" was in fact a key tenant of fascism, it was essentially a more modern take on a medieval-style guild system, with only one association per economic sector controlling the whole economics of that sector, no competition (those associations could exclude businesses from dealing in said sector), and those associations being led by government or Fascist Party officials - in effect, the opposite of what the former quote implies (and very different from how modern capitalism is at least supposed to work).

Kenya

• The quote "When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land." is often attributed to Jomo Kenyatta. But it first appeared in The Deputy, a controversial play about Pope Pius XII.

Mexico

• The phrase "I'd rather die standing up than living on my knees". Many have been the people who have been quoted to its creation: Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, etc^note A renowned Gypsy proverb says "Bury me standing, for I've been my whole life on my knees
  • There is an old Frisian folk saying "Better dead than a slave."
  • Ironically for Mexico, the conquistador himself, Hernán Cortés said the very similar "It is better to die with honor than to live dishonored." Though he was quoting from a chivalry book.

Mongolia

• Genghis Khan never actually said "Crush your enemies! See them driven before you and hear the lamentation of the women." His actual quote was much more verbose and went into detail about the women part.

Ancient Rome

• Julius Caesar never said "Et tu, Brute?" when he was stabbed to death in the Senate. We can thank Shakespeare for that one. Roman historian Suetonius reports a tale that he said "Kai su, teknon?" (which is Greek for "You too, my son?", since the Romans often spoke Greek in the Senate because it was considered more high-class and sophisticated),^note Contrary to what you might hear, it is not because Greek was the common language of the Empire; Greek was only the common language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Latin was spoken across Italy, and by Caesar's day had begun to take root in Illyria, Spain, Africa, and southern Gaul. More to the point, Senators of the 1st century BCE didn't care one whit what was the common language of the Empire; they were aristocratic Italians virtually to a man, and had Latin as their native tongue. When they spoke Greek, it was to show off their erudition. but himself believes Caesar said nothing at all.
  • The Rome TV series plays with this. Caesar tries to talk when he is dying but he can't. Later, when Brutus' mother joins those who are asking him to kill Antonius, Brutus asks: "You too, Mother?"
  • Alternatively, "Kai su, teknon" may have been the first part of a common saying at the time. The full phrase, και συ τεκνον Θα έχετε τη δύναμη kai su teknon tha échete te dyname, translates as "You too, my child, shall soon have a taste of power" - essentially, Caesar might have been trying somewhat spitefully (and prophetically as it turned out) to say "you're next, kid".
• Marcus Aurelius never said "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." This was actually a quote by Leo Tolstoy.
• When Herennius Etruscus, the son of Emperor Decius, was killed at the Battle of Abritus, Decius allegedly said "Let no one mourn. The death of one soldier is not a great loss to the Empire". But this quote is probably apocryphal.
• Julian the Apostate's last words were probably not "you have won, Galilean". The first known claim that they were comes from a text written by Theodoret in 429, over sixty years after Julian died. No earlier source says he said this.

Russia

• It was not Catherine the Great who said "The more a man knows, the more he forgives." That was more likely Confucius.
• Boris Yeltsin's surprise resignation speech is often quoted as "I am tired, I am leaving". However, the closest phrase he did utter was "I am leaving, I did everything I could have done"
• Vladimir Putin never said "To forgive the terrorists is up to God, but to send them to him is up to me." That being said, it is rather similar to multiple badass boasts he's made about dealing with terrorism, so it's not hard to see why people think he did.

South Africa

• Critics of Israel will sometimes quote Nelson Mandela as saying "We consider ourselves to be comrades in arms to the Palestinian Arabs in their struggle for the liberation of Palestine. There is not a single citizen in South Africa who is not ready to stand by his Palestinian brothers in their legitimate fight against the Zionist racists." But in truth, there's no evidence that he actually said this.

Soviet Union

• While it's certainly true that he had a poor view of political opponents and said as much, ("idiot Romanov" and "windbag Kerensky"), there is no record of Vladimir Lenin ever using the term "useful idiot" (polyezniy idiot) to describe Western communists. Its earliest known usage is in a 1948 New York Times article on Italian politics.
  • Lenin is often quoted as outlining the following strategy for global revolution: "First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We will not need to fight. It will fall as a ripe fruit into our hands.” Problem is that Lenin never said this, or anything like it.^note The America-centric nature of the quote should be a giveaway; Lenin and other early Bolsheviks considered the British Empire their main opponent, as it was the strongest capitalist power of the time. It makes much more sense in the post-WWII context it originated than Lenin circa 1917. The quote has been attributed to a speech made by Cardinal Francis Spellman in the 1950s, warning about the dangers of Communism during the Cold War; it became a favorite of the John Birch Society and other far right groups, and was occasionally cited by Ronald Reagan and other mainstream conservatives advocating a hardline stance against the USSR.
  • Lenin is also associated with the remark that "we will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us," which has also been attributed to Stalin, Karl Marx and other Communists. Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky could not find the provenance of this quote, and believes it spurious, though he notes that Lenin made similarly cynical (if less pithy) comments about capitalist powers throughout his career that could have been mistranslated as this.
• "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." - Despite the general misconception, Josef Stalin never said that. The quote, in fact, is the final line of chapter eight of The Black Obelisk (1956) by Erich Maria Remarque. A very similar saying appears in Kurt Tucholsky's satirical work, The French Witticism, from almost thirty years earlier.
  • Stalin is also sometimes credited with "Death solves all problems. There is a person - there is a problem. No person - no problem". This is actually a quote from the novel Children of the Arbat, by Anatoly Rybakov.
• The "We Will Bury You!" speech Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave to a group of Western politicians in 1956. Partly because of poor translation, partly because West-East tensions were very fraught in this stage of the Cold War, the comment was interpreted as an Implied Death Threat against the United States. The complete quote is "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in" (Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас закопаем Nravitsya vam ili nyet, no istoria na nashey storone. My vas zakopayem.), in reference to the common Marxist saying "The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism". Khrushchev was actually expressing the communist theory that capitalism was historically predetermined to eventually be supplanted by communism. He meant that the Soviet Union would long outlast the Western powers, as in "we'll attend your funeral", not cause it. "We will still be here when they bury you!" might be more to the point.
  • He also never said "You Americans are gullible. We’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." That was a quote that was passed around by anti-communists, especially within the John Birch Society, in the early 1960s, although it's widely believed the quote was popularized by either Ronald Reagan in 1961 or Ezra Taft Benson, who wrote Khrushchev said it in a speech proceeding his trip to the US in a book he wrote in 1962. Later, Benson claimed that Khrushchev had told him this face-to-face when Khrushchev was in the United States. Either way, ignoring how cartoonishly perfect the quote is, there remains no evidence he said, or even thought this. Note the same "overripe fruit" metaphor as in the spurious Lenin quote above, also beloved of the John Birch Society.

Spain

• Boabdil, the last Muslim king of Granada, most likely wasn't told by his mother Aixa to "Cry like a woman what you couldn't defend like a man." This line first appears in the 1764 book Los Paseos de Granada, almost three centuries later.
• Queen Isabella never vowed not to change shirts until Granada surrendered. This anecdote was told first about her great-great-granddaughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia, about the siege of Ostend in 1601-1604. And it is undetermined if she actually said it, or if she did, but as a sarcastic comment, rather than a vow.
• Philip II, on hearing the Spanish Armada's fate, never said: "I sent my ships to fight men, not tempests"; "I did not send my men to fight the elements", or anything similar. The closest sentence in his correspondence to the Duke of Parma, who would have led the ground troops in the invasion of England is: "We shall neither lose nor win reputation in God's action, just not speak of it." The line about tempests was first made by a biographer four decades after Philip II's death and was popularized by a 19th century historian.
• Former PP (conservative) president of the Valencian region and later minister Eduardo Zaplana never said, "Estoy en política para forrarme" ("I'm in politics to make myself rich"). This was said by another Valencian PP member, Vicente Sanz, in 1990.
• PM José María Aznar did not say "I speak Catalan in private", but the more verbose "I don't just read it [Catalan] for many years now, but also understand it and, moreover, when I am in close circles, not quite large, I also speak it too."
• It is said that during her tenure as Minister of Culture, Esperanza Aguirre replied to a comment about Portuguese writer José Saramago with "Sara Mago, an excellent [female] painter". This was actually said by Aguirre's puppet version in the satirical program Las Noticias del Guiñol, in which Aguirre was portrayed as a Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
• Despite being a notorious malaproper, PM Mariano Rajoy never began a statement with "Many afternoons and good thanks" (Muchas tardes y buenas gracias). This was an edited video in the satirical program El Intermedio. However, he did really say "We are feelings and have human beings."
• "Otegi is a man of peace" is pervasively (and perversely) attributed by the Right to socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and later to leftist leader Pablo Iglesias in order to portray them as soft on, or sympathetic to terrorism.
  • The attribution to Zapatero started after a 2006 interview where he actually said: "Arnaldo Otegi has made a speech for peace, to begin a new political era in the Basque Country. Those were his words, and now we wait for action to happen in the same direction." Rather a different emphasis (suggesting he doesn't really trust Otegi to follow through on the peace thing).
  • As for Iglesias, his words in a 2016 speech were: "Regarding the Basque nationalist left, the separatist left... we have many ideological differences. I don't agree with Arnaldo Otegi in many things, but I was glad, and I say it here clearly, when he was released from jail. And I also say, I'd like, I'd be happy, and I think it would be very good in Spain, if the Basque nationalist left maybe was more convincing when it is time to ask for forgiveness, because there is nothing bad in asking for forgiveness. But after saying this, it must also be said that without people like Arnaldo Otegi, there would be no peace. And to those who have contributed to a situation of peace and future, even if we have many differences, we must recognize and thank them for it."

Ukraine

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy's famous Dare to Be Badass boast at the start of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine ("The fight is in Kyiv; I need ammunition, not a ride") is in hindsight often agreed to be apocryphal. Originating from an Associated Press article, the exact quote has never been verified.

United Kingdom

• The last words of Thomas More are usually quoted as "I die the king's good servant, but God's first". In reality, he said "and" according to the Paris Newsletter of the account of his execution ("Qu’il mouroit son bon serviteur et de Dieu premierement."). This is also faithful to More's character, who wrote in one of his letters:
  "I had always, from the beginning [of my service to Henry VIII, in 1518], truly conducted myself by looking first upon God and next upon the King according to the lesson that his Highness taught me at my first coming to his noble service, the most virtuous lesson that ever prince taught his servant..."
• Queen Elizabeth I's final words were supposedly, "All my possessions for a moment of time", but there's no contemporaneous record of this. It was probably inspired by Shakespeare's Richard III: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"
  • Which itself is purely an invention of Shakespeare's, Richard himself never said anything like it.
  • Elizabeth said nothing at all during the last several days of her life. She communicated with her attendants with signs. She was very old for her era and the opinion of those around was that she hastened her death by refusing to follow medical advice. (Then, again, medical practices of the day being what they were, she may have simply decided that medical advice was useless.)
• Edmund Burke never said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."; it was "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
• Queen Victoria never said "We are not amused." (Which didn't stop Rose of Doctor Who from trying to get that phrase out of her anyway. Maybe she didn't know that... or maybe she did and was trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.)
  • In fact, Her Majesty once wrote in her diary "We are VERY MUCH amused!" Yes, with those capitals.
  • She did once say something similar - to a courtier who was telling a dirty joke in the presence of a group of young children. And she wasn't using the Royal "We", by "we are not amused", she meant "The courtiers and I are not amused." The idea that she was constantly gloomy comes both from her many years in mourning after her husband died and from the fact that having one's picture taken was considered a very serious matter, and people normally didn't smile in photos. Also, for much if not most of her reign, photographers discouraged smiling for technical reasons, because the subject couldn't be trusted to hold the smile long enough for it to be captured cleanly. Photography was brand-new technology when Victoria took the throne in 1837, and the early photographic processes that prevailed until the last 10-15 years of her reign had exposure times measured in seconds or minutes—too long to reliably hold anything but a resting/neutral facial expression. Even then there are more pictures of Victoria laughing than of all nine of her children combined.
  • Horrible Histories quotes the aforementioned diary entry in the book dedicated strictly to her, but also claims that she did say it once; supposedly, at a party, an official made mention of the fact he did a "humorous" impersonation of the Queen and was asked to show it. Victoria is said to have made her famous quote after observing that said "impersonation" amounted to him putting a white handkerchief on his head and puffing out his cheeks whilst frowning. Likewise, her episode in the live action series ends with her lamenting in exasperation that she only said her famous quote once, in response to having attended a dreadfully dull opera.
  • The ITV drama Victoria gives her the line as a response to a corny Shakespearean pun centering on chickens.
• "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" was actually derived from a statement by Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
• Edward VII (at the time the Prince of Wales) probably never had this exchange with his then-mistress, Lily Langtry, but it's too good to not report:
  The Prince of Wales: Why should I spend any more money on you? I've spent enough on you to build a battleship!
  Lily Langtry: And you've spent enough in me to float it!
• Edward VIII did not offer the in-depth commentary on unemployment, "Something must be done." A journalist made it up.
• British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain never said "Peace in our time". What he did say however was "Peace for our time".
• Famous lines never said by Winston Churchill:
  • "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash."; his personal secretary, Anthony Montague-Browne, said that although Churchill did not say this, he wished he had. (Note that the British Navy abolished the practice of flogging in 1948, and the rum rations were discontinued in 1970. The modern navy runs on sodomy, and sodomy alone.)
  • Speaking of Churchill, he never said "I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears." The quote was shortened from the less memorable, "I have nothing to offer but blood and toil, tears and sweat." Even historians get this one wrong.
    • The new £5 note introduced in September 2016 - featuring Churchill's portrait - gets the quote wrong, by saying, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
  • One false phrase often claimed in Horrible Histories is "told you so," in response to Neville Chamberlain's perceived naivety when attempting to appease Adolf Hitler, only for the latter to then break his promise not long after. Carried over to the TV sketch show.
  • Churchill also never said "We shall fight them on the beaches", it was:
  I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Even though large parts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
  • Very few people know that the quote paraphrased from George Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France during the First World War:
  "The Germans may take Paris, but that will not prevent me from going on with the war. We will fight on the Loire, we will fight on the Garonne, we will fight even in the Pyrenees. And if at last we are driven off the Pyrenees, we will continue the war at sea."
  • Also, someone once wrote to The Strand magazine complaining that someone had ended a sentence with a preposition. Somebody commented in reply, "This is nonsense^note sometimes misquoted as “arrant pedantry” up with which I will not put," often attributed to Churchill but it almost certainly wasn't him. This misattribution may originally owe to the simple expedient that the kind of Know-Nothing Know-It-All who still insists on following this "rule" decades after it was thoroughly discredited as an artificial construct with less bearing on how English is actually used than Japanese verb conjugation would be more swayed by a sentence constructed to prove its absurdity if it comes from someone known for eloquent, moving speeches than from some random person writing to a magazine.
  • "Any man who is under thirty (or twenty) and is not a liberal has no heart, and any man who is over thirty (or forty) and is not a conservative has no brain."
  • "Americans will always do the right thing — after exhausting all the alternatives." This is actually a modification of a quote by Israeli politician Abba Eban, who said "Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources."
  • "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
  • "He is a modest man, with much to be modest about." (supposedly said with regard to his deputy and later successor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee.)
    • "An empty car pulled up in front of Downing Street this morning, and Clement Attlee got out." A biographer once asked Churchill about this, and Churchill actually seemed offended that the quote was attributed to him, as he held Attlee in high personal (if not political) regard.
  • "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see." What Churchill actually said was "The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward".
  • "There is no such thing as a good tax." The correct attribution is to Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore.
  • Also on taxes, "The idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusions which has ever befulddled the human mind," gained popularity in the US during the Reagan years—and there's a reason it had failed to do so before.
  • In Germany, the quote "I'll never believe in a statistic I haven't forged myself" or paraphrases thereof is almost always associated with Churchill, and many Germans react surprised when Anglophones have never heard of it. That's because that line was attributed to Churchill by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in an attempt to downplay casualty reports broadcast to Germany by The BBC. This background faded out of public consciousness, and today it's often cited to emphasize the arbitrariness of statistics, similar to Mark Twain's "Lies, damned lies and statistics". That the snarkiness of the quote actually fit with Churchill's public perception probably helped.
  • On the Internet, neo-Nazis like to claim that Churchill said "Germany is too strong. We must destroy her." in November of 1936. There appears to be no credible source for this quote.
  • "The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists", often used to discredit people who call themselves anti-fascists.^note See the "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag" quote in the "United States (After 1900)" section below.
  • "The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine." This remark referring to Charles de Gaulle was actually made by General Edward Louis Spears, Churchill's personal representative to the Free French. When film producer Alexander Korda in 1948 asked Churchill if he'd made the remark, Churchill denied doing so, but said he wished he had.
  • "You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life." It's believed he technically did say this, but the attribution to him is still misleading. This is actually a paraphrase of a sentiment originally expressed by Victor Hugo.
• There's no record of George Orwell saying, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." This apparently originated as a paraphrase of several loosely similar things he wrote rebuking pacifists in World War II, the most similar of which occurs in his essay "Notes on Nationalism": "Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." The reference to "rough men" apparently originated with conservative columnist Richard Grenier.
• "We are going to build the Tories out of London." Attributed to Herbert Morrison,^note Incidentally, Peter Mandelson's maternal grandfather but no evidence that he said it.
• Hartley Shawcross didn't say, "We are the masters now." It was "We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time."
• The Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, when asked to name the greatest difficulty facing a PM, said: "The opposition of events." This was changed to "events, dear boy, events", by persons unknown.
  • He's even better known for saying "You've never had it so good." The actual quote was "indeed let us be frank about it — most of our people have never had it so good."
• "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" is often said to have been the slogan Peter Griffiths used in the 1964 general election. Not only was that not his slogan, evidence suggests that it was coined by Neo-Nazis, not Tories.
• Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 speech on immigration does not actually feature the precise expression "rivers of blood". He instead quotes Virgil, who saw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".
• British Prime Minister James 'Sunny Jim' Callaghan is commonly perceived to have been asked about the late 1970s economic crisis and responded, "Crisis? What crisis?" when he never said anything of the sort. It was actually a Sun headline. The real quote:
  "Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos."
  • The headline was probably inspired by Supertramp's 1975 album, Crisis? What Crisis?.
• Margaret Thatcher did say "there is no such thing as society", but quoted in context it's a lot less evil-sounding:
  "I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."
  • Thatcher never said "Whoever thinks the ANC is going to run South Africa anytime soon lives in cloud cuckoo land". The actual quote was said by Thatcher's spokesman, Bernard Ingham, during a conference in 1987: "It is cloud cuckooland for anyone to believe that could be done." The "that" was a Canadian reporter's proposed scenario of the ANC coming to power in South Africa after violently overthrowing the white-led regime. Ingham was proven right because the ANC never overthrew the regime by force of arms. Instead, the ANC became the dominant party in South Africa after the peaceful dismantlement of Apartheid.
• Norman Tebbit did not actually say "on yer bike". It was actually:
  I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking 'til he found it.
• British Conservative leader (and later Prime Minister) David Cameron never exhorted people to "hug a hoodie." The closest excerpts from his July 2006 speech are:
  Because the fact is that the hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself. We - the people in suits - often see hoodies as aggressive, the uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters. But, for young people, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive. They're a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in, don't stand out. For some, the hoodie represents all that's wrong about youth culture in Britain today. For me, adult society's response to the hoodie shows how far we are from finding the long-term answers to put things right. [...] So when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement - think what has brought that child to that moment.
• London mayor Sadiq Khan never said terrorism was "part and parcel of living in the big city". In his original speech, he said that security preparedness to prevent them from occuring was "part and parcel" of his job as the leader of a major city. This statement then got paraphrased by British tabloids, which was further Quote Mined by his opponents to make it sound like he was downplaying the seriousness of terrorism when in reality he was meaning the opposite. He also made this statement in response to the 2016 Chelsea bombings in New York City, not in response to the 2017 London Bridge attacks as is sometimes erroneously reported.
• The famous British newspaper headline "FOG IN CHANNEL; CONTINENT CUT OFF" hasn't been found in any archive and is probably apocryphal.

United States (before 1900)

• Benjamin Franklin:
  • He wasn't the first to say, "Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." He may have quoted it, but it originated in 1716 with Christopher Bullock's "'Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes." Or perhaps Charles II of England: "There are three things in life that are certain, death, taxes and that it is raining in Tavistock."
  • Benjamin Franklin's supposed proverb, "The proof is in the pudding" is actually, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating", and it is a bit older than Benjamin Franklin, dating at least to 1615, when it was used in Don Quixote. Furthermore, most people don't even understand what that's meant to mean. In the above quote, the term "proof" means "test", not "evidence". Possibly the reason for the original misquote.
  • Benjamin Franklin also did not say, or write, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." The word "lunch" hadn't yet entered the English language in his time (so he would have said "dinner" instead).
    • The first part of the quote comes from a 1990 Usenet discussion group on politics and seems to have been written by Gary Strand, although he may have been quoting someone else. Two years later it was used, unattributed, by Marvin Simkin writing in the Los Angeles Times, with a much better second half: "Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote."
  • Another commonly mangled Franklin quote is "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither." What Franklin actually said is: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
    • The quote did not necessarily originate with Franklin, it's an excerpt from a letter written in 1755 from the Assembly to the Governor of Pennsylvania. That said, Franklin was a prominent member of the Assembly—being a leader of the anti-proprietary party^note Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony, i.e., the prerogatives of the Crown were exercised by a proprietor, which for Pennsylvania was the head of the Penn family. The Penns lived in London and saw the colony as a moneymaking venture; the Governor was the appointed representative of the proprietor, and a focal point for anti-proprietary anger.—in 1755, so it's possible that it did issue from his pen.
  • Another Ben Franklin misquote is "beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." The real quote - from a letter - was about rain, and how it makes grapes for wine grow, as shown here.
• The legend of six-year-old George Washington and the cherry tree was invented wholesale by Mason Locke Weems, who didn't include it until the fifth edition of his Life of Washington (1806), six years after the original. And even then, the supposed sentence was "I cannot tell a lie, Pa; you know I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my hatchet", not the cornier "I did it with my little hatchet".
• A now dated example: the Presidential Oath of Office was never recited in its constitutionally-mandated form until 1933, instead being asked of the President with the perspective changed to second person, and the President's response during that time was typically a simple "I do." That said, any portrayal of George Washington swearing "I, George Washington, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" would be inaccurate. What's more debated is whether or not Robert Livingston, Chancellor of New York, added "so help you God" when reciting the oath in question form to Washington, though historians swear up and down that Washington's reply was something along the lines of "I so swear, so help me God." On a related note, Herbert Hoover, being a Quaker, is often assumed to have affirmed, as opposed to sworn, the oath. In fact, he was the last President to recite the oath in question-answer form, and the wording used by former President, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, included the word "swear".
• The famous line "All men are created equal" is from the Declaration Of Independence but is (understandably) often misattributed to the Constitution instead.
• The United States Constitution never uses the phrase "separation of church and state." It was actually Thomas Jefferson who referred to the Constitution itself as "a wall of separation..." Whether or not the concept exists within the document despite that phraseology not being used has been controversial for at least as long as the Constitution has existed; probably even longer. The exact words in the First Amendment along these lines are "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
• Another one regarding the Constitution: while automatic removal from office upon conviction in an impeachment trial is mandated in Article II, disqualification is an optional penalty, being the most severe penalty the Senate can impose on conviction. In reality, disqualification motions have only succeeded against three officials who were overthrown in this manner; another official who had been convicted, Justice Alcee Hastings, would later make a political comeback in the decade following his impeachment, eventually ending up in the House of Representatives.
• Andrew Jackson supposedly said, "To the victors [belong] the spoils." to justify handing out political offices to his cronies. The real version was said by William Marcy: "When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. ... They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils."
  • Jackson is also alleged to have said, in regards to the Supreme Court ruling against removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from Georgia, "(Chief Justice) John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" While the quote certainly captures Jackson's sentiment on the matter, he never actually said it; the words were put in his mouth by Horace Greeley.
• The famous speech by Chief Seattle "How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? [...] The end of living and the beginning of survival." was invented in 1971 by screenwriter Ted Perry for the movie Home.
  • Si’ahl's actual speech (based on translations — he spoke in his native language) was far more pessimistic than what's been dubbed the "New Age" version.
  • Also, the lines "Only when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money" is not part of either speech, but a separate quote first attributed to natives in eastern Canada around 1972.
• Abraham Lincoln never said, "As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless." The quote was published 20 years after Honest Abe's death, and his secretary immediately denounced it as a fraud. But it was used a lot in the 1896 presidential election, and came to be seen as fact. That said, it is true that Lincoln was not entirely comfortable with the rise of the corporate business elite in his time—even though (or perhaps because) he had worked for these early corporations (as a major attorney for railroads in Illinois in the 1840s-50s).
  • Another quote usually attributed to Lincoln is "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time." However, there is no hard proof that he ever truly said it, although again it is consonant with some things he said or clearly believed.
  • Another famous quote attributed to Lincoln is "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." The real form of this quote was birthed by Robert G. Ingersoll to refer to Lincoln, first as part of a short piece published in April 1883 in the religious periodical "Unity", and later in an essay published in "The North American Review" in December 1885: "Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity; but if you wish to know what a man really is give him power. This is the supreme test." Also, the heavily-altered quote was coined by a columnist in a Williamsburg, Iwoa newspaper in 1931 as part of a collection of local news together with some quotations and adages.
  • The phrase "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" is believed to have originated with Lincoln describing Union General Ambrose Burnside. The quote (at least in this incarnation) actually originates from Charles Fair's 1969 book From the Jaws of Victory, a study of military incompetence. Fair himself never attributed the quote to Lincoln: the quote appeared on the book's dust jacket of all places. Fair thought his publishers somehow confused his own comment on Burnside with a Lincoln quote.
  • It's not "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we lose our freedoms it will be because we have destroyed ourselves from within." It's "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." According to Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame, the 16th President "was denouncing mob violence which would lead to chaos, provoking the public to demand law and order, which would be provided by an ambitious leader who would rule tyrannically."

United States (after 1900)

• Early-20th-century anarchist writer and activist Emma Goldman was quoted on a T-shirt, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," but actually said the more verbose:
  "At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal."
• Woodrow Wilson is supposed to have offered this notorious endorsement of the film The Birth of a Nation (whose intertitles approvingly quote his writings on the American Civil War and Reconstruction): "It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." That Wilson was a white supremacist who worked to re-segregate the Federal government makes the quote seem plausible. However, evidence suggests that it was actually an invention of a publicist for the film. While Wilson did host a White House screening of the movie, he actually criticized Nation as an "unfortunate production" and (correctly) anticipated that it would intensify racial resentment and violence.
• "I have seen the future, and it works." derives from Lincoln Steffens' 1921 statement on the Soviet Union: "I have been over into the future, and it works."
• 1930s Texas governor Miriam A. Ferguson is often quoted as having stated, in opposition to bilingualism in Texas schools, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas." However, the quote predates her first gubernatorial term by over forty years and there's no evidence she actually said it.
• Calvin Coolidge said "After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world." This quote is usually shortened to the less meaningful "The business of America is business."
  • People probably accept the shortened version due to Coolidge being known as "Silent Cal," i.e. a man of few words.
• Herbert Hoover never actually said "Prosperity is just around the corner", either before or during The Great Depression. However, he did mention prosperity during a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in early 1930.
  "While the Crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States: that is, prosperity."
• "The people are just too damn dumb to understand!" is often attributed to Harry Hopkins, U.S. Secretary of Commerce under FDR, as a supposed response to critics of the New Deal (and thus held out by conservatives as an especially egregious instance of "liberal elitism"). What Hopkins actually said was, "You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand..." making it more of a Take That! against the type of people who would misinterpret his remarks.
• "When fascism [or tyranny] comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag." Some people add "and carrying a cross". This has been attributed both to Huey Long and to Sinclair Lewis, who made a Long-esque fascist demagogue the antagonist of It Can't Happen Here. Lewis did write in that novel that "the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty." But it's very likely that the original quote came from the Rev. Halford E. Luccock, in a 1938 sermon, speaking about the HUAC / Dies Committee.
  "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism'. The high-sounding phrase 'the American way' will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such as lawless violence, teargas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties." – "Disguised Fascism Seen as a Menace◊," New York Times, September 12, 1938.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Infamy Speech" did not refer to December 7, 1941 as "a day that will live in infamy." The actual quote was "a date which will live in infamy". This is probably changed due to the mistaken perception that "that" is for restrictive clauses and "which" is for non-restrictive clauses and never shall the two mingle, and "date that" either sounds weird or the ending "t" sound gets lost in the start of the next word so it becomes "day that".
• Technically speaking, Harry S. Truman did say "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em", but it was in reference to it being an "old political trick" which he was disparaging rather than endorsing. The full quote is as follows:
  "On the one hand, the Republicans are telling industrial workers that the high cost of food in the cities is due to this government's farm policy. On the other hand, the Republicans are telling the farmers that the high cost of manufactured goods on the farm is due to this government's labor policy. That's plain hokum. It's an old political trick: 'If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.' But this time it won't work."
• General Motors CEO Charles Wilson is often quoted as saying "What is good for General Motors is good for the country," often cited as the perfect example of corporate arrogance. The fact is, he actually said "...for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa," when asked if he would be willing to take actions against the interests of GM during his confirmation hearings for being appointed Secretary of Defense.
• John Steinbeck is often quoted as having stated that "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." This actually paraphrases part of an essay he wrote for Esquire magazine in 1960, wherein the "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" were bourgeoisie who imagined themselves as proletarians, not the other way around.
  "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
  "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
• John F. Kennedy did say "Ich bin ein Berliner", in a 1963 speech given in West Berlin. However, contrary to some reports, this would not have sounded like "I am a jelly doughnut" to native Berliners, any more than a German politician saying "I am a New Yorker" would sound like he was announcing that he was a magazine.^note The jelly doughnut is called Pfannkuche by native Berliners.
  • Speaking of which, he did not say "We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard". What he actually said was:
    "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
• Malcolm X's quote "We wake up, we clean up, we stand up!" is often misquoted as "It's time to wake up, clean up and stand up!".
• Martin Luther King Jr.:
  • Although he did say, "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.", he never said, "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." That quote comes from Facebooker Jessica Dovey (responding to the killing of Osama bin Laden and the jubilant reaction of many people at it), and she made it plain in her original status which part was the actual MLK quote. Too bad that Facebook status copy/pasters can't interpret punctuation.
  • While not outright misquotations, some have taken MLK out of context to make him seem more radical than he really was. For one example, when he said "a riot is the language of the unheard", he wasn't speaking in support of the rioters; he called riots "self-defeating and self-destructive" in the exact same interview where he said that. He was simply observing that people will almost inevitably turn to violence when they feel they have no other recourse.
• Civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer is credited with "Sick and tired of being sick and tired": it's on her tombstone. The complete quote is "All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
• Lyndon Johnson is often quoted as saying of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that "I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years." The quote is usually sourced to Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan, who reportedly overheard Johnson make the comment to two (unnamed) governors. Johnson is known to have used racial slurs in private conversation, usually when talking with segregationists he was trying to convince to support his policies. But MacMillan is generally not considered a credible source by historians, as he reported a variety of improbable anecdotes about Johnson's White House behavior that invariably painted him in a negative light. This also clashes with Johnson's other famous quote about the Act, that "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," whose provenance is also sometimes disputed but was verified by Bill Moyers, Johnson's press secretary.
• When portrayed in fiction, Richard Nixon will almost invariably assure anyone listening that he is not a crook. While Nixon actually did say "I am not a crook" it was actually part of a larger speech and not a standalone sentence like it's usually shown.
  • "I am not a crook" has always been how that part of the speech has been quoted in anything making fun of Nixon during Watergate and after. However, the then-president used a contraction, the relevant part of the speech going: "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got." For that matter, Nixon was commenting specifically about accusations that he was illegally using government funds to refurbish his private residences, rather than the Watergate break-in per se.
  • In Oliver Stone's Nixon, the president says to a portrait of John F. Kennedy, "People look at you and they see who they want to be. They look at me and they see what they are." This is occasionally reported as an actual Nixon quote, but Stone says that it came from journalist Tom Wicker.
  • Nixon never said "We're all Keynesians now". Milton Friedman did, but as part of a longer quote. Nixon did however say the much less grandiose, "I am now a Keynesian in economics" in a 1971 New York Times interview.
  • Speaking of Friedman, he never said "There's no such thing as a free lunch" — Robert A. Heinlein said it.
• Henry Kissinger never said, "Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?"
• Pauline Kael, the late film critic for The New Yorker, never said, "I can't believe Nixon won. Nobody I know voted for him," referring to his landslide reelection in 1972. The actual quote is:
  "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
  • Compounding this, the common version of the quote is frequently misattributed to either Katharine Graham or Susan Sontag. For additional confusion, it's occasionally applied to Ronald Reagan's victory in 1984 instead of Nixon.
  • It should be noted, moreover, that Kael herself was well aware of the misquoted version being attributed to her, and did nothing to discourage it. In fact, according to her biographer she delighted in it, not so much because it expressed her views but because it aggravated conservatives.
  • And even when the wording and attribution of the quote is accurate, it's still often cited^note as in this 2020 piece from the New York Times with the false implication that Kael was surprised by Nixon's victory.
• "Well-behaved women rarely make history" has become a much-quoted slogan, but contrary to widespread belief it doesn’t originate from either Eleanor Roosevelt or Marilyn Monroe, and its original context wasn't touting empowerment for women. It was from a 1976 paper by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the original quote was "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Ulrich used the line to explain why there weren't many historical records about the lives of women in Puritan New England.
• Andrea Dworkin never wrote "all men are rapists" or "all sex is rape." Nor did Catherine MacKinnon.
  • The first is mostly Parody Displacement, but even correctly attributing it to Marilyn French overlooks that the quote comes from a fictional character in her novel The Women's Room, and does not represent French's personal views according to the woman herself.
  • As for the second, "heterosexual intercourse is the pure, distilled expression of men's contempt for women" is also from a work of fiction, and is by "Corinne Dwarfkin" in Andrew Lewis Conn's P: A Novel. Dworkin herself specifically argued against that viewpoint in Letters from a War Zone.
• Jimmy Carter's 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" speech is often referred to as the "Malaise" speech, even though the term "malaise" was never used in the speech. It was a Carter aide, Clark Clifford, who'd told reporters before the speech that it would be about "malaise", and the media latched onto the term as shorthand.
• Ronald Reagan never said ketchup was a vegetable. School lunch regulations allowing ketchup to be counted as a vegetable for purposes of meeting the minimum requirements for lunches were passed under his administration, but he never actually claimed that this meant it actually was a vegetable.
  • Everyone attributes "Trust, but verify" to Reagan. In fact, it was an old Russian maxim (Доверяй, но проверяй; Doveryai, no proveryai) that Reagan learned from Suzanne Massie, a writer and expert on Russian history who'd been advising him about his dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan himself never claimed credit for it and always cited its Russian origin.
• "You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy." came from "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy," Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX)'s famous putdown to Dan Quayle (R-IN). The full quote and the story are here.
• Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign is a fascinating source of these:
  • Clinton himself never said, "It's the economy, stupid!" Said phrase was adapted from something James Carville (Bill Clinton's campaign manager) had written on a whiteboard at their campaign headquarters, which displayed the following under "Rules":^note Which, as policy blogger Matthew Yglesias noted about 30 years later, Carville posted to remind his campaign staffers—all committed Democrats who hated the policies of the Reagan-Bush years—that they were weirdos and that the people they needed to vote for Clinton needed to be persuaded to make a change.
    Change vs. more of the same
    The economy, stupid
    Don't forget health care
  • Carville is often quoted as having said during the '92 race that Pennsylvania consists of "Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle." Carville actually said that "Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks", which has the same general meaning (Paoli being the westernmost major suburb of Philadelphia, and Penn Hills being an eastern suburb of Pittsburgh) but isn't exactly the same.
  • During a famous debate moment in which an audience member asked the candidates how the national debt had affected each of them personally [1], Clinton is commonly remembered as having said "I feel your pain." While his response conveyed empathy more effectively than the other candidates, he didn't use those words or anything close. He had, however, used the phrase earlier in the year while addressing a heckler at a campaign event.
• Also from the 1992 presidential race, James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate, did start out his opening introduction speech at the 1992 vice-presidential debate with "Who am I? Why am I here?", but the third part of the statement, "I'm not a politician", is largely forgotten, as is the fact that the statement was intended as tongue-in-cheek Self-Deprecation, meant to make Stockdale appear like a folksy outsider, and acknowledging that he was a political novice who most people hadn't heard of.^note He'd been used by Perot as a placeholder name in the states that required a third-party presidential candidate to list a running mate in their filing papers, with Perot fully intending to replace Stockdale with someone else, but then Perot dropped out of the race after a few months, only to re-enter right before the debates, without time to replace Stockdale, which left Stockdale with only a week to prepare for the debate. Stockdale later said that Perot had zero contact with him prior to the debate. However, since Stockdale's entire appearance at the debate was marred by his appearing to be confused and out-of-sorts, the line is sometimes taken to be a genuine bit of senility by the then-69-year-old retired admiral.
• Al Gore did NOT say he invented the Internet. His actual statement became, through Memetic Mutation and political opposition, Al Gore, inventor of the Internet.
  • The actual statement: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." It's abundantly clear to anyone listening that he wasn't claiming credit for literally creating the internet, but for rather spearheading the funding that helped develop the technology that made the internet possible. And it turns out, he did just what he claimed.
    • Gore likewise didn't claim to have "discovered" Love Canal (he said that he "found" it as he was gathering information on polluted sites for a congressional hearing), or to have been the inspiration for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal's Love Story (he said that he inspired some elements of the character, which Segal, who had met Gore while he was writing the novel, confirmed).
• George W. Bush
  • Bush didn't say, "...then the terrorists have won", or "...then the terrorists win". The meme originates from the comments of Frank Pierson, then-head of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, after he refused to postpone the Oscar ceremonies following 9/11: "If we give in to fear, if we aren't able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war." Similar wording and sentiments had already been said about a number of other topics.
  • Nor did Bush ever say that "a lot of our imports come from other countries". The actual phrase was "a lot of our imports come from overseas", i.e. countries other than Canada and Mexico.
  • Bush also never told John Kerry "You forgot Poland" during their first debate in 2004. The actual exchange went like this:
    John Kerry: When we went in, there were three countries: Great Britain, Australia and the United States. That’s not a grand coalition. We can do better.
    Jim Lehrer: Thirty seconds, Mr. President.
    George W. Bush: Well, actually, he forgot Poland. And now there’s 30 nations involved, standing side by side with our American troops.
  • Bush never used the malaproper "Strategery" (although he did say "misunderestimated", "recruitiments", "internets" and "nuculear"). That was Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live.
  • Several supposed "Bushisms" including "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it", and "The future will be better tomorrow" were actually said by his father's vice president Dan Quayle.
  • W is reported to have told French President Jacques Chirac on the eve of the Iraq War: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people's enemies before a new age begins." No American or French official has ever confirmed that he said this, so the quote is probably apocryphal.
  • Bush never said anything remotely along the lines of “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” The quote is apparently an urban legend based on one dubiously sourced article. Interestingly, it sounds similar to a real quote by President Ronald Reagan: “I’m no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” (There is—svoboda.)
• John Kerry himself fell victim to this, having allegedly used the phrase "Who among us does not love NASCAR?" in a 2004 presidential campaign speech, botching an attempt to appear to be an average guy by using a very tweedy Boston Brahmin turn of phrase. In fact, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who popularized the line, not only misquoted Kerry, she also took the line out of context, since Kerry was actually knocking George W. Bush for making an appearance at the Daytona 500 during an economic crisis.
  John Kerry: This president went to Florida just the other day to start the NASCAR races. There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR and who isn't a fan, but I'll tell you what: instead of just saying "Gentlemen start you engines," and during that race listening and looking at a race while 350 manufacturing jobs were lost, $171 million was added to the deficit of our country...
• Inverted by the (notoriously corrupt) Congressman Jim Traficant (D-OH), who made a habit of ending his speeches on the House floor with "Beam me up..."
• Sarah Palin never said, "I can see Russia from my house." That was Tina Fey parodying Palin on Saturday Night Live, who had actually said, "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." Which is actually true, although the island in question has a population of less than 150. SNL was mocking Palin's statements because she was arguing that she had foreign-policy experience by virtue of being the governor of a border state—with a very long (friendly) border with Canada, and (for all practical purposes) a sea border with the somewhat-less-friendly Russia.
• Barack Obama is often quoted as saying that the U.S. has 57 states. What he actually said was "I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go [Oregon]. Alaska and Hawaii...I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it." He should have said "47 states", but in his speech mistakenly implied that there were 60 in total, probably by doing the math in his head as he was speaking (50 minus 3) and not noticing what he was saying. It's also worth noting he made the comment during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, which had 56 contests including non-states like D.C. and Puerto Rico.
• Obama is often quoted as having declared there are "no red or blue states." It's a misquote from his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention when he was still a state senator, specifically the following passage:
  Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
• Georgia Representative John Lewis got flack for saying that the slave trade changed the migratory paths of sharks in the Atlantic. The bad part is that it was actually New Jersey Representative Donald M. Payne Jr. who said it. The worse part is that the misattribution (along with other colorful exaggerations) could have originated in a rather poorly worded reply in Yahoo Answers.
• The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act's infamous "indefinite detention" provision caused such an uproar at the time it was signed that Chris Hedges sued the US government over the issue, worried that it had brought back the Alien and Sedition Acts and thus the slightest criticism of US foreign policy would get people like him a one-way ticket to Gitmo. In point of fact, the provision is one of counterterrorism, but it's specifically meant to target those "who are part of or substantially support Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States", and according to the definition of "enemy combatant" (who would under said provision be the "covered persons") you have to be in armed conflict against the United States and its allies or in direct and explicit support of those in armed conflict against the United States and its allies to truly be in danger of indefinite detention (as Hedges learned when his case reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013).
• Nancy Pelosi is often misquoted as saying, "We have to pass [the Affordable Care Act] so we can find out what's in it", implying that she hadn't read the bill. This misquotation changes a rather important pronoun and, with it, the entire meaning of the quote. Pelosi's actual remarks were, "You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy" (emphasis added). "You" here means the American people; Pelosi was arguing that there was so much misinformation and scaremongering surrounding the bill that people wouldn't understand what it actually did until after it went into effect. This has, in fact, largely ended up being Vindicated by History, as the Affordable Care Act has become significantly more popular in the years since its passage, and Republicans' attempts to repeal it in 2017 have been greeted by nationwide outrage and protests, to the extent that, thus far, all of them have failed.
• Hillary Rodham Clinton's infamous "basket of deplorables" comment wasn't aimed at half of all Americans, as is often claimed (or at least implied). It was aimed at half of Trump's supporters; she stated explicitly that the other half of Trump's supporters had legitimate views and grievances. While many may take offense at even the accurate version of what she said, it has still been frequently distorted.
• Donald Trump:
  • Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway infamously gaffed by referring to the the non-existent "Bowling Green massacre," misremembering a full-blown terror attack when what actually occurred was the arrest of two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2011 for allegedly trying to send money and weapons to al-Qaeda. Some people mistakenly believe Trump himself made the gaffe.
  • Trump never denied the existence of the virus that caused the COVID-19 Pandemic, despite both Democrats and Republicans who thought he called it a “hoax”. While he did downplay its seriousness, comparing it to the common cold when it soon proved itself significantly worse, the “hoax” he was referring to was the accusation of Congressional Democrats that he was mismanaging the nascent crisis, soon after Congress failed to remove him over a scandal involving a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart.
  • In spite of the meme, he never used the exact phrase "This has been the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever" to describe any trade deal. The closest was when he said NAFTA was "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere" during a 2016 presidential debate.
  • He never said "They tested my DNA and it wasn’t DNA. It was USA” while hospitalized for COVID-19. This quote originated from a screenshot of a fake tweet, which was later added to a screenshot of a video of him in the hospital to give the appearance of a caption on TV.
• A common term in political punditry is the "Kinsley gaffe", which often gets defined as a politician making a slip of the tongue and inadvertently letting their true feelings on a subject come out, or occasionally even as a synonym for Freudian Slip. However, the origin of the term, a piece written by pundit Michael Kinsley in 1988, defined it much more narrowly: "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say." In other words, the key point of a Kinsley gaffe is that it has to be something that everyone already knows, but would practically be career suicide for a politician to admit, like the need to raise taxes to increase government spending on popular programs. Basically, a Kinsley gaffe is supposed to be the political version of Marge Simpson's "That's true, but he shouldn't say it."
• "In this Ohio diner...", a phrase used to satirize the tendency of national media outlets to talk to a few random people in Flyover Country, then try to characterize their opinions as being representative of sentiments in "the Heartland", is the oft-repeated catchphrase of the New York Times Pitchbot account on Twitter, but as far as can be determined, the Times has never actually used that specific phrase in a headline or subhed.
• Joseph Welch didn't ask Joseph McCarthy "Have you no shame?" during the Army-McCarthy Hearings; his quote was "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The famous rebuke "Have you no shame?" (which is often depicted as marking the beginning of McCarthy's downfall) appears to stem from a misquote in a 1987 Washington Post article; despite the Army-McCarthy Hearings being televised more-or-less in their entirety, no verifiable recordings of the quote exist.

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