Beam Me Up Scotty / Real Life

Remember, popular misquotes from politicians and royalty go on the Politics page.

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Spacefarers

• Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, did not say during his space flight, "I don't see any god up here," or the variant, "The Earth was blue, but there was no God." The latter formulation is actually adapted from something said by Nikita Khrushchev to the Central Committee of the Communist Party: "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there." He said it in the context of the USSR's anti-religious campaign, and indeed the quote is attributed to Gagarin in many repositories of atheist quotes (as well as works like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater). Gagarin's actual line was simply, "The Earth is blue [...] How wonderful. It is amazing." Indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an old friend of Gagarin claimed that he had been a fairly observant follower of the Russian Orthodox Church.
• Neil Armstrong:
  • He never said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky." It's based on an Urban Legend that Armstrong was referring to an argument he had heard as a child from his neighbor's house, in which Mrs. Gorsky angrily tells Mr. Gorsky he'd get oral sex from her when the neighbor kid steps on the Moon. Snopes went ahead and debunked that one.
  • Michael Collins didn't suggest saying "Oh, my God, what is that thing?" and breaking transmission mid-scream, either. That was an invention of the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon scriptwriters.
  • Armstrong's famous line on stepping on the moon really was, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." But that isn't what he'd planned to say — it was supposed to be "one small step for a man". NASA's PR people claimed the "a" was lost in transmission, and some observers thought that he said it real fast and no one picked it up, but Armstrong admitted after retirement that he just flubbed the line — and that his Dramatic Pause before "one giant leap for mankind" was his attempt to salvage it. Boy, did he ever.
• Jim Lovell did not say, "Houston, we have a problem," during the Apollo 13 mission. He said, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." But NASA loved the formulation in the present tense — so much so that they were already using it in their 1970 documentary about the mission, titled Apollo 13: Houston, We've Got a Problem. Apollo 13 used the present tense— "We have a problem"— to show that the problem was ongoing.
  • Gene Kranz never said "Failure is not an option" during the Apollo 13 mission, either. When doing research for the movie, the production crew interviewed several flight controllers, including Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick, who told them that there never was any panic during the mission, but that Mission Control simply "laid out all our options and failure was not one of them," and a version of it made it into the script. Krantz did like the line so much he used it as the title of his memoir.
• The Mars rover Opportunity never said, "My battery is low and it's getting dark," as its solar power gave out and it "died" in a Martian dust storm. Indeed, the rover was a robot and never said anything, not even through a PR human on Earth. It just gave periodic data bursts; the line was a poetic translation of the last such data burst by science reporter Jacob Margolis.

Clergy

• St. Jerome, translator of The Bible into Latin, never said, "Good, better best..." Turns out the quote was meant to rhyme in Latin, but it doesn't. The earliest source for the line is a periodical from the 1890s.
• Pontifical legate Arnaud Almaric never said at the massacre of Beziers, "Kill them all, God will sort out his own." It's uncertain whether he said anything of the like, and if he did, it would have been the Latin Caedite eos, novite enim Dominus qui sunt eius — "Kill them, for the Lord knows his own," the second bit being a direct quote from The Bible. Furthermore, the quote is often misattributed to Simon de Montfort, who participated in the events and later led the Crusades but was not yet in a commanding position.
• William of Ockham (or Occam, or Hockham) never said, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."^LatinEntia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The closest he got was "Plurality must never be posited without necessity"^LatinNumquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, "Sentences of Peter Lombard" and "It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer"^LatinFrustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora, "Summa Totius Logicae". This is commonly known as Occam's Razor, but it was never called such until 1852. And Ockham didn't invent it, either; versions appear attributed to Aristotle, Alhazen, Moses Maimonides, and Duns Scotus.
• Saint Teresa of Avila never said, "There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones." Nor did any of the several other Theresas from Christian culture. The line comes from Truman Capote's book Answered Prayers; while he did claim that book was named after the quote, it is totally unattributed before the book.
• Church reformer Martin Luther never said, "Here I stand, I can't help it^GermanHier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders." Nor did he say, "If I'd known tomorrow would be the Apocalypse, I'd still plant an apple tree today^GermanWenn ich wüsste, dass morgen die Welt unterginge, würde ich heute noch ein Apfelbäumchen pflanzen."
• Pope Leo X never said, "It has served us well, this myth of Christ." While it's probably his most famous quote, it actually originated in the Protestant propaganda piece Acta Romanorum Pontificum, written over 70 years after his death, with the intent of disparaging Catholics and not Christianity as a whole.
• Pope Francis never said, "It is not necessary to believe in God to be a good person. In a way, the traditional notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual but not religious. It is not necessary to go to church and give money — for many, nature can be a church. Some of the best people in history do not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were done in His name." There is no credible indication that he ever made such a statement.

Crime

• The official motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is not "We always get our man" — it's "Maintiens le droit", officially translated as "Defend the law"^note and by the wags as "Keep right", using a very literal interpretation of the original French — but useful to know for the British visitors. The Mounties do use "We always get our man" as an unofficial motto, though.
• Popular belief holds that Columbine shooting victim Cassie Bernall was confronted by the killers asking if she believed in God, and said "yes" before being shot. Except they didn't even ask her if she believed in God; they just shot her. (Nor did they say, "There is no god," before shooting her.) Eric Harris did ask another student, Valeen Schurr, if she believed in God (in response to her exclamation "Oh God!"), and she didn't say yes — she tried to guess what Harris wanted to hear ("No— yes— no...?"), causing Harris to laugh and walk away without shooting her. This is a tragic one that owes itself in part to the victim's parents; Bernall's mother wrote the memoir She Said Yes, which is how a lot of people picked up on it. It's heartbreaking; while some critics claim it's an attempt by conservative Christians to blame the shooting on "godless atheists", one can't really fault the parents for searching for a reason she had to die. Others also believe another victim, Rachel Scott, was the one who said yes.
• Dan White, on trial for the murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and councilor and gay activist Harvey Milk, did not advance a "Twinkie defense". It's commonly believed that his lawyers argued that he was incapable of premeditated murder because he ate a lot of Twinkies. His lawyers never even mentioned Twinkies. What they did try to argue was that he was incapable of premeditated murder because of depression, and tried to prove he was depressed with evidence that he used to be a fitness advocate but had recently started binging on junk food (and not that the junk food caused his depression, but rather that it was a symptom). When White was acquitted on the murder charge and just got voluntary manslaughter, there was significant outcry, but not all understood how he beat the murder charge, leading to the aphorism "Twinkie defense" becoming something of a meme in the pre-Internet days. The term itself comes from a politician who protested the ruling on the courthouse steps by waving a Twinkie in the air.
• Charles Manson did not announce, "I am the devil, and I have come to do the devil's work." It was instead Charles "Tex" Watson, who told Wojciech "Voytek" Frykowski, "I'm the devil; I'm here to do the devil's business. Give me all your money."
• Bryan Hartnell, putative victim of the infamous Zodiac Killer, never said during the attack, "Please, kill me first! I can't bear to see her killed!" — "her" being fellow victim Cecelia Shephard. Hartnell himself denied having said it, and it isn't attested in any contemporary news or police reports. It turned out to have been a later invention by a journalist looking to make the encounter more dramatic. The quote nevertheless continues to appear in books and documentaries about the Zodiac Killer.
• Lindy Chamberlain never wailed, "Dingos ate my baby!" or anything like it. Indeed, it was her extremely quiet and reserved behaviour that led law enforcement and the public to suspect her to begin with. And her conviction was subsequently overturned when it was found that dingos really did eat her baby.
• Rodney King didn't quite say, "Can't we all just get along?" His speech during the L.A. riots was a bit longer; the closest phrase was, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?"
• Bank robber Willie Sutton never said, in response to an interviewer's question, that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is." He denied it himself and blamed a reporter for making it up.
• No young baseball fan ever asked "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, "Say it ain't so!" during Jackson's trial for the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal (in which he and his teammates threw the World Series). A contemporary report by the Minnesota Daily Star reported it as "It ain't so, is it, Joe?" with Joe replying, "Yes, I'm afraid it is." But this is also considered apocryphal, as modern scholars doubt that such an exchange took place; baseball essayist Roger Angell, writing about the film Eight Men Out, calls it an "engraved Insta-Sob punchline".
• Serial Killer Harvey Glatman never said "The reason I killed those girls was 'cause they asked me to. They did; all of them... They said they'd rather be dead than be with me". As you can guess, it's too good to be true and doesn't come directly from Glatman. It's actually a quote from a Dragnet episode that was very loosely based on him. The detective on Glatman's case acted as a consultant for the episode, but the exchange in which the killer says this is fictional.
• NBA rookie Tony Farmer, fainting on hearing his prison sentence for sexual assault in 2012, did not say, "Bruh!" He didn't say anything, and his lawyer only muttered, "Oh shit..."

Entertainers

• In a well-memed clip from the making of the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas is often quoted as describing the writing process as 'It's like poetry; it rhymes'. Naturally, since the original speech was unscripted, the actual wording is less precise than that; 'It's like poetry, sort of, they rhyme'.
• Michael Caine didn't say, "Not a lot of people know that" or "Not many people know that." It was actually Peter Sellers' impression of him on Parkinson. It became a meme strongly associated with Caine; Caine blamed Sellers for escalating it by using his impression as his answering machine message, leading to a lot of people hearing it. Caine eventually used the line himself in Educating Rita, but by then it was an Ascended Meme. Here's the original usage:
  Sellers: "Not many people know that." This is my Michael Caine impression. You see, Mike's always quoting from the Guinness Book of Records. At the drop of a hat he'll trot one out. "Did you know that it takes a man in a tweed suit five and a half seconds to fall from the top of Big Ben to the ground? Now there's not many people who know that!"
• Barry Norman never said, "And... why not?" That was an impression of him on Spitting Image. Norman later lampshaded this with the line, "And, as Rory Bremner might say, why not?"
• Mariah Carey never said, "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." Although several people took it seriously, including Bill Bryson, it actually came from a satirical and fictional interview in an online magazine.
• Groucho Marx:
  • Groucho never said, in response to a female contestant on You Bet Your Life saying she had eleven children, "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!" Snopes says he didn't, but he did say something similar to a contestant who came from a family of seventeen: "Well, I like pancakes, but I haven't got a closet full of them." The cigar line suggests something particularly filthy, and Groucho himself set the record straight in an interview with Roger Ebert:
    Marx: I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally"? I never said that.
  • Groucho's gravestone doesn't say, "Pardon me for not rising." It's not a grave at all, but rather a columbarium niche. It's small, sober, and only has his name, dates of birth and death, and the Star of David.
• Walt Disney never said, "If you can dream it, you can do it." That line was created by Tom Fitzgerald as the tagline for the 1983 EPCOT Center attraction Horizons. The misattribution began in the late 1990s after Horizons closed, and wasn't helped when Disney itself started attributing the quote to Walt Disney in the mid 2000s.
• Jerry Seinfeld never had a Running Gag in which he said:
  • "Who are these people?" He said it once, in a 1981 comedy routine, and never on Seinfeld, the show that made him famous. The line comes from Gilbert Gottfried's impression of him. Seinfeld did eventually utter the line on Saturday Night Live, but by then it was an Ascended Meme and a parody of the whole Beam Me Up, Scotty! phenomenon.
  • "What's the deal with [X]?" It's actually a Stock Joke, and it was parodied quite often on Seinfeld as the kind of thing people think he says — the only time he actually says it on the show is in an Imagine Spot in George's head.^note Indeed, George is the only character in the entire show to ask, "What's the deal with [X]?" in a straight manner when he asks, "What's the deal with Aquaman?" Indeed, the whole thing is considered a by-word for lazy comic routines; Seinfeld best illustrates this in a Saturday Night Live sketch he hosted in which a bunch of comedians participate in a game show and "What's the deal with [X]?" is all they know how to do. Seinfeld never even did it in his stand-up routines; the only place where he did use it straight might be the book SeinLanguage, in which he asks what the "deal" is with B.O. The specific formulation "What's the deal with airplane peanuts?" occasionally trips some people up, because Seinfeld did a lot of observational humor about air travel, but he never actually said the line; that's actually George in the aforementioned Imagine Spot.
• P.T. Barnum did not coin the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute." The phrase was first said by David Hannum, a con man who exploited George Hull's Cardiff Giant hoax, and continued to make money off of it even after the hoax had been disproved. Ironically, Hannum said this about people who paid to see Barnum's own version of the Cardiff Giant; he wanted to buy the original from Hannum, but Hannum refused. Some sources report Barnum as having wished he had said it.
• Comedienne Gracie Allen never answered her husband George Burns' "Say good night, Gracie" with a "Good night, Gracie" in any medium. This can definitely be attributed to Laugh-In fans, as Dick Martin always said, "Good Night, Dick".
• A quote often attributed to Dolly Parton: "When I was young, we had to wash in a basin. You'd wash up as far as possible, then down as far as possible; then you'd wash possible." She said it in an interview, but it's a very old joke; it appears in Ulysses.
• The origins of the line "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" are a bit murky. Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and Laurie Anderson, among many others, are credited with it. Research has turned up a couple of late 1970s citations that attribute the line to Martin Mull (who started out as a comedic singer-songwriter before becoming better known as an actor). But no one's found any examples yet of Mull using the line, nor has anyone ever just asked him if he said it.
• Aleister Crowley never said, "If a dog disturbs your meditation, shoot it." The actual quote in context (from Book Four - Part 1) is this:
  "Subsequent theologians have tried to improve upon the teachings of the Masters, have given a sort of mystical importance to these virtues; they have insisted upon them for their own sake, and turned them into puritanism and formalism. Thus 'non-killing,' which originally meant 'do not excite yourself by stalking tigers,' has been interpreted to mean that it is a crime to drink water that has not been strained, lest you should kill the animalcula. But this constant worry, this fear of killing anything by mischance is, on the whole, worse than a hand-to-hand conflict with a grizzly bear. If the barking of a dog disturbs your meditation, it is simplest to shoot the dog, and think no more about it."
• Surrealist Andre Breton did not recommend "dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd." He said this was the simplest surrealist act, not the best, and followed it up with an extensive footnote saying he was not recommending this action, but trying to explain why people oppressed by his society's "petty system of debasement and cretinization" would fantasize about doing it.
• Andy Warhol never publicly said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" or anything similar. The actual origins of the quote are rather murky, but it first definitively appeared in a Swedish art museum's exhibition of Warhol's work in 1968; a document claims the museum's director told him to include the quote because "it sounded like something Warhol would have said."
• Jack Nicholson, on being informed of Heath Ledger's death, did not say, "I warned him." He said, "Oh, that's terrible. I warned them" (emphasis added). "Them" here refers to other people he knew who had been taking the sleeping pill on which Ledger had allegedly overdosed; Nicholson himself had tried it once and immediately regretted it. In his actual words, "I didn't know Heath Ledger, but I know those pills."
• Adam Carolla never said, "Women aren't funny." An interviewer asked him "who are funnier, men or women?" and he replied off-handedly, "men". The story took a life of its own and he became the poster-boy for sexism in comedy.
• W. C. Fields actually never said, "Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad." It was actually said by Leo Rosten about W.C. Fields.
• Laurence Olivier probably never told Dustin Hoffman, on seeing his Method Acting in Marathon Man, "Why not try acting, dear boy? It's easier." While he may have actually said some variation of it, the context for the quip is completely inverted. The story goes that Hoffman had gone 24 hours without sleep in preparation for a scene in which his character was physically exhausted, and Olivier was telling him off for wrecking his body and not learning how to act. What actually happened was that Hoffman came to the set one morning visibly exhausted from staying out late partying the night before, and Olivier (if he said anything at all) was joking about Hoffman's hedonistic excesses.
• British film director Mike Figgis never told a U.S. immigration officer "I'm here to shoot a pilot," nor was he detained at LAX for several hours after saying anything like it, as incorrectly reported by the Guardian. The report was based on a misreading of an interview in which Figgis said he had almost spoken the phrase to a U.S. immigration officer who was questioning him in the Toronto airport about the purpose of his visit,^note No, that's not a mistake — Toronto's airport, like most major Canadian airports, has United States Customs and Immigration "preclearance" facilities, allowing you to "cross the border" into the US before you catch your plane, meaning that the flight is treated as domestic once you get to the US. This generally reduces the amount of time you spend waiting in a line at immigration. but realizing that it would come out wrong, he instead said, "I'm here to film the first episode of a potential series for Sony."
• Marilyn Monroe never said, "I'm selfish, impatient, and little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve my best." Despite all the Glurgey reposts on your Facebook feed, there's no evidence she actually said this.
• Jeff Foxworthy's famous shtick isn't quite, "You might be a redneck if [X]." It's "If [X], you might be a redneck." Certainly, it doesn't change anything of substance (and Foxworthy did have an album and book titled You Might Be a Redneck If...), but if you care about delivery, you gotta get it right.
• Hayao Miyazaki never said, "Anime was a mistake; it's nothing but trash." It originated as a joke caption placed over real footage from the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which was then spread by fans who were aware of its humorous intent, but it's similar enough to things he's actually said that some have taken it to be legit.
• Steve Irwin never said, upon finding a wild animal, "And I'm gonna stick my finger up its butt." It originates from a parody of him on South Park, most likely playing on how the accepted way of determining the sex of a large reptile is to stick a finger into the cloaca.
• Bob Geldof never said during Live Aid, "Give us your fucking money!" Although it passed into British folklore to such an extent that it appeared at number five in a list of the most memorable moments of British television, the actual formulation was, "Fuck the address [for donations], let's get the [telephone] numbers!"
• Sally Field, at the 57th Academy Awards, didn't quite say, "You like me, you really like me!" The actual line was, "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me."
• Alyssa Milano, in her tweet that popularized the #MeToo movement, did not include the phrase as a hashtag. Instead, the tweet read, "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet." Milano may or may not have been aware that an organized "Me Too" movement had begun ten years earlier, started by Tarana Burke for sexual abuse survivors, especially those in underprivileged communities, to connect with each other and know they're not alone. Burke liked Milano's hashtag campaign but expressed concern that it would turn into a fad.
• Mehmet Oz, host of The Doctor Oz Show and aspiring politician, never said in his April 2020 interview on Fox News that it was okay to reopen schools (early in the COVID-19 Pandemic) because only 2 to 3 percent of American schoolchildren would die of the virus if they did. That number would be obscene; with over 56 million of them in the country, the death toll would be over a million. He was widely condemned for prioritizing the economy over human life, at a time when 80 percent of Americans supported further restrictions. Instead, he was saying that the mortality rate of the virus as a whole would only grow 2 to 3 percent if the schools reopened; given that the death toll in the U.S. from the virus at the time was around 60,000, the additional death toll would be about 1,000 more.^note He turned out to be quite wrong on that, though; the schools never reopened, but by the end of May, the death toll in the U.S. hit 105,000.
• John Lennon:
  • He never called The Beatles "bigger than Jesus". He said, "We're more popular than Jesus" (emphasis added). It changes a lot; rather than being a Blasphemous Boast, Lennon was lamenting the Beatles' insane popularity and the near-religious reverence of their fans. Lennon was asked about this a lot over the years and always maintained that the latter is what he said and meant.
  • He never said, in response to a question as to whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, that he "isn't even the best drummer in the Beatles." That quip was popularized by English comedian Jasper Carrott, who apparently cribbed it from a BBC radio show. Indeed, the idea that Ringo wasn't a talented drummer and that the other Beatles didn't respect him is something of a Fandom-Enraging Misconception among Beatles fans.
• Early children's radio host "Uncle Don" Carney spent half of his career denying that he had been caught on a hot mic saying "That oughta hold those little bastards." The same Urban Legend was attributed to unnamed children radio hosts before Carney became famous, and after television replaced radio, to Bozo the Clown. The Simpsons referenced this by giving the line "That oughta hold those little SOBs" to Gabbo in "Krusty gets Kancelled".

Military

• "Over and out" is not an actual military communication closure. It's actually self-contradictory; "Over" means that the speaker is awaiting a response, and "Out" means that the speaker is done talking and no response is necessary.
• Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who "coined" the term Flying Saucer, never actually used that term to describe his UFO encounter. Rather, he said that they flew "like saucers skipping across water." He would later describe the shape of the crafts he saw as something similar to a stealth bomber. Nor did he say that he thought it was extraterrestrial in origin — he always maintained that he thought that it was some sort of top secret military aircraft.
• Multiple people from history, from George S. Patton to Winston Churchill, have been credited with the phrase, "We have met the enemy, and it's us!" Not only did none of them say anything of the kind, the actual quote is "We have met the enemy, and they are ours," said by US Navy Commander Oliver Hazard Perry in a dispatch to General William Henry Harrison following the defeat of the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. Cartoonist Walt Kelly later parodied the phrase (originally in a PSA poster drawn for the first Earth Day in 1970) with his character Pogo, who said while glumly observing a litter-strewn landscape, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
• German General Friedrich Paulus did not say, in response to his promotion to Field Marshal while being encircled at Stalingrad, "I will not shoot myself for that Bohemian corporal!" No Prussian or German Marshal had ever surrendered, so all those present got the meaning of the promotion. There is no proof that he said it, or even that he shared the aristocratic Prussian officers' personal disdain for Hitler. Paulus' adjutant, Colonel Wilhelm Adam, witnessed the event and wrote that Paulus' words were, "One can't help feeling it's an invitation to suicide. However, I'm not going to do them such a favour."
• "Better honor without ships than ships without honor" (and variations thereof) has been attributed both to Hernán Cortés (who sank his ships in order to keep his men from defecting during the conquest of Mexico) and to Spanish Admiral Cervera before the Battle of Santiago (who bottled his own fleet in Guantanamo Bay and then ensured its destruction by sailing it in front of the American fleet, one by one and during daylight). The actual origin of the sentence is the more obscure Spanish Admiral Méndez-Núñez during the equally obscure Spanish-South American War of 1865-1866, but there are at least two versions of it^note One, in concluding a correspondence to the Spanish Minister of State in 1865, goes "First honor without Navy, then Navy without honor." The other, in reply to an Anglo-American fleet that threatened to retaliate if he bombed Valparaíso in 1866, goes "The Queen, the Government, the country and I would rather have honor without ships, than ships without honor.". The attribution to Cortés may come from his similar line, "Better to die with honor than live dishonored,"^SpanishMás vale morir con honra que deshonrado vivir but he was quoting from the then popular chivalry book The Romance of Turpin and would have expected his audience to know the reference.
• General Pierre Cambronne, in response to his British opposite number Charles Colville demanding his surrender after the Battle of Waterloo, did not say, "The Guard dies and does not surrender^FrenchLa Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas!" This line came to be known as le mot de Cambronne or "the word of Cambronne", a by-word for Defiant to the End and often associated with him. There was also a pervasive belief that he said a different "mot de Cabronne": Merde!^note Literally "Shit!", but better translated as "Go to Hell!", which in the decades after would lead to "mot de Cambronne" becoming a euphemism in French for "merde". He denied saying either "mot".
• American silversmith and patriot Paul Revere, during his famous ride through Massachusetts in 1775, did not shout, "The British are coming!" The line was invented by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1860 poem "Paul Revere's Ride", which pretty much single-handedly transformed the little-known Revere into a historical icon, so the line became part of the mythos. But it doesn't even make sense for Revere to have said this, for two reasons: (1) back then America had not yet declared its independence, so the rebels would have also been "British"; and (2) it's not very smart to openly roust up La Résistance when the government troops could hear and understand you. Indeed, Revere apparently never finished his ride and was captured in Lexington (other riders did, but their names must have rhymed painfully), and the exact message he used was the more coded, "The regulars are coming out!" Some latter-day depictions of Revere try to resolve the first point but keep Longfellow's famous cadence by changing it to, "The Redcoats are coming!"
• Admiral Horatio Nelson's last words before his death, in the midst of his triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar, are often quoted as, "Kiss me, Hardy" — spoken to the captain of his ship HMS Victory, Thomas Hardy. They probably weren't, but there are are a couple of layers to this: Quite a few challenges to the veracity of this account come from a misplaced desire not to make a manly British hero like Admiral Nelson look homoerotic. That's not the reason why he wouldn't have said this; men were known to share platonic kisses at times of great emotion in early 19th century England, and this wouldn't have been seen as homoerotic back then. As for what Nelson's actual last words were, there are multiple candidates, all with their own issues:
  • They weren't "Kismet, Hardy." The use of the word "kismet" in English to mean "fate" is not attested until 1830, about a quarter of a century after Nelson died. This one was probably an attempted Hand Wave by later Victorian homophobic sensibilities.
  • They may have been, "Now I am satisfied — thank God I have done my duty." This comes from the account of the ship's surgeon William Beatty, who said Nelson said this after he got his kiss (and may have been delirious as well), which suggests that even if Nelson did say, "Kiss me, Hardy," those weren't his last words.
  • They were more likely, "Drink, drink — fan, fan — rub, rub," a barrage of instructions to fix the various ailments he was suffering in his final hours. This one comes from the accounts of three different people close to Nelson (his chaplain Alexander Scott, his steward Chevalier, and the ship's purser Walter Burke), so this is considered the most historically accurate and the line usually attested by Nelson's modern biographers. Except it's not nearly as heroic or quotable as the other options.
• Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto:
  • He did not, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, say, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve"; that's a line from Tora! Tora! Tora!. It's based on something he did say, but it's heavily paraphrased. ^{Actual quote}"A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack." This hasn't stopped other movies about the event from having Yamamoto say the Tora! quote or some variant of it, quite possibly because the movie's version is far punchier and more concise.
  • Yamamoto never boasted that Japan would march across the United States and dictate peace terms in the White House. He was much more circumspect; he said that Japan beating the United States would require them to capture the entire country and obtain the surrender in the White House, and there was no way Japan could muster the resources to do that. Indeed, he was criticizing the Japanese military establishment for believing they could break America's back and convince them to surrender just by winning a series of naval battles. The misconception that Yamamoto was boasting took hold in America, where it was often used to justify particular brutality against the Japanese.
• German World War I General Erich von Falkenhayn did not call the British Expeditionary Force "lions led by donkeys". That was apparently an invention of historian Alan Clark, MP, for his 1961 book (wait for it) The Donkeys. In any event, similar phrases long predate Falkenhayn's apocryphal comment, from as far back as the Crimean War. Speaking of which:
• William Howard Russell did not quite describe the 93rd Highlanders' stand against the Russian cavalry at Balaclava as a "thin red line". He called it a "thin red streak tipped with steel," but "thin red line" was more poetic and eventually purposed to describe the British Army as a whole.
• The Spanish didn't call the Armada invincible; the English did. The Spanish called it the "Great and Very Happy Armada", which is almost worse.
• The Duke of Wellington did not describe the Battle of Waterloo as "a damn close run thing"; he called it "a damn nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw" (emphasis added), using a more archaic definition of "nice" meaning "requiring great precision" (as observed in Good Omens). He also never said the battle "was won on the playing-fields of Eton"; the closest we got was the historian Nevill saying that decades later, Wellington saw a cricket match at Eton and remarked, "There grows the stuff that won Waterloo."
• Ethan Allen, HERO OF THE REVOLUTION! never said, "In the Name of the Great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress!" when he defeated the British commander in upstate New York. He actually said the much less elegant, "Come on out of there, you damned old rat." In any case, as one historian noted, he had a commission from neither one.
• A few from The American Civil War that were kinda said, but not in the context everyone thinks:
  • Robert E. Lee did say, in a letter to his wife, "In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages." But this does not mean he was an abolitionist, as some commenters have claimed. The full context of the letter paints a different picture; while slavery did trouble him, he believed it was the lesser evil compared to leaving blacks to their own devices without first giving them "their instruction as a race", and that emancipation had to wait for divine intervention. He even suggested that this could take thousands of years, stating "The doctrines & miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to Convert but a small part of the human race, & even Christian nations, what gross errors still exist!"
  • Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson did get his nickname from General Barnard Bee at the First Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run if you're in the North). Except he's usually quoted as having said, "There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall! Rally around the Virginians!" But he may have actually said, "Why is Jackson standing around there like a damned stone wall?" — one praises Jackson's courage, the other implies he's not following orders. Reports are unclear, because Bee died that afternoon and never got the chance to clarify what he said.
  • Nathan Bedford Forrest never quite said, "Git thar fustest with the mostest." He described the essence of his strategy as "to git thar fust with the most men," or alternatively (and far more eloquently), that he "just took a shortcut and got there first with the most men."
  • Ulysses S. Grant, during the war, never said, "If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side." The earliest this is attested is a Democratic pamphlet during the 1868 election, attempting to paint Grant as a hypocrite. While Grant said very little about slavery during the war, what he did say suggested that he was determined to put down the rebellion and that while he never politically identified as an abolitionist, he had no qualms about eliminating slavery as well if that was what it took.
    • Grant is also rumored to have said "Good help is so hard to come by these days,” when asked why he didn't free his slaves before the 13th amendment was passed. In fact, Grant never said this, and he had freed the only slave he ever owned in 1859, two years before the war started. His wife had custody of some of the Dent family slaves during the war, but there's no evidence she ever legally owned them.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman did not quite say:
    • "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve." He actually said, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." It's the same thought, but the apocryphal formation gives it a more poetic cadence.
    • "War is hell." He said something like it to the graduating Class of 1879 at Michigan Military academy, but it was part of a longer speech, and accounts differ as to whether he said exactly, "War is hell," or "It is all Hell!"
• General Philip Sheridan is sometimes quoted as saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." The earliest version is actually, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," and Sheridan denied having even said that. Even worse is when Sheridan's line is attributed to far more famous Americans, including some who were not anti-Indian.
• Douglas MacArthur never said, regarding The Korean War, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." While he certainly believed it, and it is the first of the classic blunders, there's no evidence he actually said it. The closest he came was, "Anyone who commits the American Army in the Asian mainland should have his head examined." The "land war in Asia" quote was alternatively attributed to Omar Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Bernard Law Montgomery, none of whom said it either; Montgomery came the closest, telling an interviewer, "Don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia," but by then he was talking about The Vietnam War and may have picked it up from elsewhere.
• Curtis LeMay did not quite say about Vietnam that America "should bomb them back to the Stone Age." While he was certainly inclined to think so, he never expressed the thought like that; the "Stone Age" line is a somewhat less bloodthirsty quote from a 1965 memoir: "They've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."

Scientists and engineers

• There is no evidence that Galileo Galilei, after his trial before the Italian inquisition, said, "And yet it moves" (Italian E pur si muove). The myth is only attested starting a century after Galileo's death, and it was later repurposed into the similarly apocryphal account of Galileo heroically fighting a closed-minded Catholic Church.
• Charles Darwin did not:
  • Coin the phrase "survival of the fittest"; Herbert Spencer did. Darwin did use it in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, but he correctly attributed it to Spencer.
  • Propose or use the term "Social Darwinism". First, the use of the term "Darwinism" implies someone else summing up Darwin's theory or ideology rather than being uttered by the man himself (unless he were particularly full of himself). And second, Darwin was aware of the gist of what today is called "Social Darwinism", and it perturbed him greatly.
  • Renounce evolution on his deathbed. Not that it would change scientific consensus if he did, but he didn't. That one's a longstanding favorite of creationists.
• Thomas Edison never said, "Invention is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration." What he actually said (in a spoken statement published in Harper's Monthly) was "Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration" (emphasis added).
• Albert Einstein is quoted as saying a lot of things he never said, probably because he's one of the single biggest by-words for "smart person" in recent history, and if you agree with Einstein, apparently that makes you very smart by default — so people love quoting him to make a point. He didn't say:
  • "Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. It taught me many things, and I am greatly indebted to it. Geophysical evidence reveals the power of the stars and the planets in relation to the terrestrial. In turn, astrology reinforces this power to some extent. This is why astrology is like a life-giving elixir to mankind." He actually had no interest in astrology. It's possible someone meant "astronomy" (the scientific study of celestial objects) but mistakenly said "astrology" (e.g. horoscopes).
  • "We only use ten percent of our brain." The myth appears to have originated in Lowell Thomas' foreword to the massively popular book How to Win Friends and Influence People. And even then, Thomas didn't attribute the "fact" to Einstein but rather to Harvard professor William James, who did do research on the subject but never concluded anything like the ten-percent myth.^note His experiments actually showed a correlation between diet, tutoring, and the ability to do intellectual tasks, which seems like a banal conclusion today but was groundbreaking at the time because it suggested that intelligence was not simply a function of genetics.
  • "Everything's relative." Indeed, he didn't want to call his theory "relativity" because he suspected people would say things like that.
  • Anything about the fourth dimension. Relativity only posits time as a fourth dimension, which could be time but could also be one of a number of other possibilities. Indeed, to suggest that time must be "the fourth dimension" would contradict a cosmological hypothesis holding that the universe is mathematically the 3D surface of a 4D hypersphere (and thus endless but finite).
  • "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe." Well, not quite; he did say, "The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits," so he expressed the thought, but someone else connected it poetically with his other work.
  • "I fear the day when technology surpasses our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots." What he actually said was, "It has become appallingly obvious that technology has exceeded our humanity," and this was said in reference to deadly weapons of war, not the advent of personal computers and smartphones.
  • "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." While he did say something similar, he used "rocks" instead of "sticks and stones". But similar statements using "spears" and "bows and arrows" and attributed to other people also exist.
  • Anything about the death of bees implying that mankind has only three or four years left. Snopes has a whole thing about it.
  • "There is no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat," or anything similar, especially not in a debate with a teacher in which he attempts to prove or disprove the existence of God. Theists and atheists love to "prove" that Einstein was on their side (again, because Einstein is smart and therefore right about everything); Einstein's actual opinions on the divine were somewhat ambiguous and ranged from agnostic to the more pantheistic or Deist philosophical conception of God of Baruch Spinoza.
  • That the constant cosmological constant was "the biggest blunder of his entire life." He never said anything like it.
• Sigmund Freud did not say:
  • "Dreams are the royal road to consciousness." Well, not quite; he did say, "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." Precision at the expense of poetry; spoken like a true scientist.
  • "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." The idea is that Freud wanted to prove that he wasn't always right about certain things. The common rebuttal is that he said "pipe" and not "cigar", and that he said it in response to one of his cheekier students, responding to a lecture on oral fixation by asking about his ever-present pipe. But he didn't say anything of the kind. Indeed, historians have pointed out that Freud always held precisely the opposite attitude; a cigar is never just a cigar. They further speculate that the quote was an attempt at putting Hypocritical Humor in Freud's mouth (no, not like that) as a way for contemporary audiences to lighten the otherwise disturbing implications of his theories.
  • That the Irish are "the only people impervious to psychoanalysis." The closest anyone has found is Anthony Burgess; in his introduction to a book of Irish short stories, he wrote, "One of [Freud's] followers split up human psychology into two categories — Irish and non-Irish." Similarly, Freud is occasionally cited as having determined that "there are more schizophrenics in Ireland than anywhere else"; the closest thing to that is a 1913 study showing a high percentage of Irish Americans with schizophrenia, and at that time "schizophrenia" was loosely defined and could easily serve as one of many avenues of then-pervasive anti-Irish racism.
  • Anything about what we call the Madonna-Whore Complex. It's commonly thought, even by academics, to have been discovered by Freud and codified in his 1910 essay "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men". In fact, Freud's essay only refers to a "mother-complex" as being related to the "precondition of the loved one's being like a prostitute," and this juxtaposition in psychosexual theory is Older Than They Think.
• Antoine Magnan never said that bees were incapable of flight. What he did say in "Le Vol des Insectes" was that bee flight couldn't be explained by fixed-wing calculations. In other words, bees couldn't fly unless they moved their wings. A further misunderstanding suggests that Magnan said that a bee's musculature was not strong enough to flap its wings sufficiently, but bees (and many similar insects) in fact flap their wings by "plucking" the flight muscle so that it resonates, rather than directly flexing and extending it hundreds of times per minute.
• Robert Oppenheimer's line on seeing the Trinity nuclear test, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." While he did actually say this, there are many layers to how this one got "beamed up":
  • First, Oppenheimer never said it at the time. Eyewitness accounts have him saying nothing, or possibly, "It worked!" The line comes from an interview Oppenheimer gave later in which he describes what he was thinking when he saw the test.
  • Second, the line comes from the Bhagavad Gita, but observers have struggled to find the exact translation from the original Sanskrit that formulates it this way; it's believed that Oppenheimer may have come up with this translation himself. The line is perhaps better translated as I am Time, which destroys all things; it comes from Krishna trying to convince Reluctant Warrior Arjuna to fight by dispensing with A Form You Are Comfortable With, showing that if Arjuna doesn't kill them, Krishna will inevitably. In spite of this, Oppenheimer's formulation is by far the most familiar form of the line in English.
  • Third, the common "alternative" line given to Oppenheimer in this situation, "Now we are all sons of bitches," was not said by Oppenheimer but rather Trinity site director Kenneth Bainbridge.
• Carl Sagan never came up with the catchphrase "billions and billions". While he liked to emphasize the word "billions", the form "billions and billions" was coined by Johnny Carson's imitation of him. It did become an Ascended Meme leading Sagan to use it himself eventually (even calling his book Billions and Billions).
• Murphy's Law is often given as, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." But Edward Murphy's original formulation is actually the more specific, "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then someone will do it that way." He then refined this to a comment about his assistant, saying, "If there's a way to do it wrong, he will." That last line was recast by John Paul Stapp into a general "Murphy's Law", but it's still not quite "anything that can go wrong will go wrong" because the latter implies that no one necessarily has to do anything for things to go wrong. In the interest of precision (we've got standards, dammit!), on This Very Wiki the page Murphy's Law goes to Murphy's original meaning, and the "beamed up" version can be found at Finagle's Law.

Writers

• Margaret Atwood's "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them," originates from a 1982 lecture she gave called "Writing the Male Character", but it's not exactly what she said. She was quoting other people, for starters, and she framed the observation with a bit of nuance.
  "Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine... "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said... I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed."
• Richard Brautigan never left a suicide note reading, "Messy, isn't it?" While he did kill himself rather messily in 1984, he didn't leave a note at all.
• G. K. Chesterton never said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." It's an amalgamation of two quotes from the Father Brown stories: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are," from "The Oracle of the Dog", and "You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the edge of belief — of belief in almost anything," from "The Miracle of Moon Crescent".
• Agatha Christie never said:
  • "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story." While she technically did say this, she was quoting something said by a fervent admirer of her work, and the context made it clear that she disagreed.
  • "An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her." She herself denied making this remark, and according to journalist Nigel Dennis, she was quoting "a witty wife".
• Alexandre Dumas, père never said, "Africa begins at the Pyrenees." Indeed, his son Alexandre Dumas, fils had to say explicitly that his father never said nor believed it. The attribution was not without irony, as Dumas père's grandmother was an African slave. The quote is occasionally attributed to other French personalities like Voltaire and Napoleon, but something like it may have come from Napoleon's secretary Dominique G.F. Dufour de Pradt, whose actual line is, "It is an error of geography to have assigned Spain to Europe; it belongs to Africa."
• Ralph Waldo Emerson did not say, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." The closes he wrote was this: "I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a well-beaten path to his house, [even if] it be in the woods."
• Goethe's supposed last words "More light!" are heavily disputed. Even if authentic, they may just have been mundane — less mysticism and philosophy and more "Open the dang window!" One interpretation has it that Goethe was attempting a rhyme that worked in his native Hessian (but not in standard German) as a pun on a famous rhyme from his play Faust but died before he could finish.
• A. E. Housman never wrote, "We were soldiers once, and young," or even anything closely approximating it.
• Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher who even faced this problem in his own lifetime, because he wrote a couple of works under a pseudonym, which he used to explore viewpoints that were not necessarily his own. He requested repeatedly that a quote coming from a pseudonymous work be attributed to that pseudonym, not to Kierkegaard himself. Kierkegaard also wrote a couple of works under his own name, and in those cases it is Kierkegaard speaking as himself.
• Stephen King never said, "I have seen the future of horror, and it is named Clive Barker." According to Douglas Winter (a friend of King's and author of Stephen King: The Art of Darkness), King actually said, "Well, I haven’t read this guy [Barker], but from what I understand, it’s like what Jann Wenner said: 'I have seen the future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen.' Sounds like Clive Barker might be the 'future of horror fiction.'" Berkeley Books transformed that quote into their famous blurb.^note And, ironically, King's actual quote itself contains a misquote, because it was music critic Jon Landau who originated the line about Springsteen; the actual line was "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." And it didn't even appear in Wenner's Rolling Stone, for which Landau did some writing, but the Boston-based weekly The Real Paper.
• Contrary to a thousand inspirational Tumblr posts, C.S. Lewis never wrote "You don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body." Nor is it a viewpoint he would have endorsed: in The Screwtape Letters, he actually writes that human beings are "amphibians—half spirit and half animal." The most likely source of the misattributed quote is Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which a character says "You don't have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily."
• H. L. Mencken didn't quite say, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Nor did he say "taste" instead of "intelligence". What he said, in a 1926 article in the Chicago Tribune, was: "No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby." The gist is the same, but it's missing the Eagleland element.
• There is no evidence Terry Pratchett ever said, "Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.", though the quote is sometimes attributed to him on social media.
• J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has had to deal with a number of fan-based misconceptions along these lines:
  • She never claimed to have written the first Harry Potter book on a napkin in a coffee shop. She did write it in a coffee shop, but with real paper. On hearing the misconception, Rowling joked that they'll be saying she wrote it on teabags next.
  • She never claimed that a Muggle with a gun could beat a wizard with a wand. Since this question is a bit of a base-breaker, one side or the other would love to be able to quote Rowling on this.
  • She never claimed to have regretted hooking up Hermione with Ron rather than Harry. She did say that she regretted getting them together so soon, suggesting they might have had extra work to make the relationship work, but she was clear that she didn't regret the couple to begin with. Nor did she go the opposite way and claim that Harry/Hermione shippers were "delusional"; while she was present for it, that one came from her interviewer, Emerson Spartz of Mugglenet. (This stuff matters to the fans, y'know.)
• Dr. Seuss did not say, "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." There's no evidence he said it, and the second half of it predates him considerably, first attested in 1938 (and with quotation marks, suggesting it was an aphorism even back then). As for the first part, variants thereof are also attributed to Bernard Baruch and Mark Young, who themselves were known to repeat the second part as a well-known quip.
• Mark Twain did not say:
  • "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Or at least not quite. It's true that he commented on a premature obituary about him in the New York Journal, and it's true that it's a great line (so great we named a trope after it), but he never quite said it. What happened was that the newspaper had extrapolated Twain's death from his cousin's illness (and he wasn't dead, either), leading to Twain's real comment: "James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine [...], is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration."
  • "I've never wished a man dead, but I read some obituaries with great pleasure." That one comes from the attorney and wit Clarence Darrow. Darrow knew what was up and later said, "I've never killed anyone, save for idiots attributing my goddamn quote to Mark Twain."
  • "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." The actual quote from Twain's autobiography is, "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together." The misquote comes from Richard Dawkins, who frequently repeats his version.
• Oscar Wilde is (rightfully) known for his snappy epigrams, but more than one commonly attributed to him didn't actually come from him the way people think:
  • He technically said, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." But he wasn't speaking for himself; that line comes from The Picture of Dorian Gray and is said by the character Lord Henry. Some might argue that Lord Henry is an Author Avatar (being, as he is, a Handsome Lech) and impute that to Wilde's own beliefs; Wilde only went as far as to say that Lord Henry was not a representation of him, but rather how society perceived him. (Perhaps he did too good a job.)
  • His last words were not, in reference to the room where he was staying, "The wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death; either it goes or I do." While he may have said something along these lines during his illness, those weren't his last words.
  • Dorothy Parker lampshaded the many quotes misattributed to Wilde (and foreshadowed those that would be attributed to her), writing,
    If, with the literate, I am
    Impelled to try an epigram,
    I never seek to take the credit;
    We all assume that Oscar said it.
• Spanish schools teach that Spain used to be covered by forests in Antiquity, to the point that "a squirrel could travel from the Cantabrian Sea to Tarifa [or the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, or north to south] by jumping from tree to tree, without ever touching the ground." This observation is sometimes attributed to Strabo or Pliny the Elder, but it is in none of their works, and Pliny even wrote a contrary statement ("the mountains of the Spains, arid, sterile and where nothing grows, have no remedy but to be fertile in gold"). People who have tried to track the quote in recent times have attributed it to The '70s popular TV host Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, but it predates him and the closest thing he did say was "In historical times Spain was a forest paradise. A imperial eagle, the queen of our forest birds, could have flown over the Iberian Peninsula without ever leaving an infinite green mantle", in the first episode of his show El Hombre y la Tierra. In The Baron in the Trees (1957), Italo Calvino wrote the similar but still not complete match, "I don't know if it is true that, as you read in the books, in olden days a monkey that left Rome jumping from tree to tree could reach Spain without touching the ground".
• A quote often attributed to Ashleigh Brilliant, and popular on demotivational posters, is "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." While Ashleigh Brilliant did say something like this in one of his Pot-Shots, the actual quote is, "It's possible that my whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others."

Other

• See Politics for Politicians misquotes.
• Blame the Osmonds for the misunderstanding if you must, but the real quote is, "One bad apple spoils the bunch," often with the logical follow-up, "but one good apple can't restore the bad ones." Anyone who says "One bad apple doesn't spoil the bunch" has clearly never been to a produce market.
• Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford:
  • He never actually advertised the Ford Model T as being available in "any color as long as it's black", although he did once (at least according to his autobiography) offer that owners could paint their cars in any color "as long as it's black". Indeed, the launch Model T didn't come in black at all, and the first ones wouldn't come until 1914.
  • He never quite said, "History is bunk." This is actually a paraphrase from something he did say in a 1916 Chicago Tribune interview.
    "Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."
• Economist John Maynard Keynes did not say, "When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?" He said the similar but different, "When I change my mind, I say so — what do you do?"
• Bill Gates never said:
  • "Be nice to nerds — chances are you'll end up working for one." Or any of the other "rules" from this list, for that matter. The list comes from conservative columnist Charles J. Sykes.
  • "640KB is all the memory you'll ever need," or any variation thereof. The closest anyone found was an IBM executive, and even then (a) he was saying it was all customers needed at the time, not ever, and (b) 640KB was the space needed for user programs, meaning that a bigger processor could devote more space to a bigger and fancier operating system.
• Charles H. Duell never said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." In fact, in his 1899 report, he optimistically hoped the U.S. could surpass or equal its foreign rivals in science, commerce, and industry, and urged the Fifty-Sixth Congress for support for the growing number of patents coming in. Furthermore, in 1902 he predicted that "all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness." Instead, the "beamed-up" phrase came from an 1899 issue of Punch.
• The Hippocratic Oath doesn't actually contain the words, "First do no harm." The closest it comes is translatable as, "Abstain from doing harm." Indeed, "first do no harm" can be counterproductive; sometimes you have to make things worse to make things better (e.g. cutting the patient open to perform surgery). The phrase "first do no harm" (and the original Latin primum non nocere) aren't attested until the 17th century at the very earliest, and possibly as late as the end of the 19th.
• Economist Adam Smith (he who hates your guts):
  • He never used the term "laissez-faire" to describe his economic stance. Indeed, not only did he not say it, he didn't really believe it, either; "laissez-faire" economics is defined by minimal government intervention, whereas Smith advocated progressive taxation and some level of government subsidies to small businesses.
  • He never used the phrase "invisible hand of the free market". In all his surviving writings — over a million words' worth (The Wealth of Nations is a notorious Doorstopper) — the phrase "invisible hand" alone only appears three times, and only once pertaining to economics. And even then, it doesn't mean "invisible hand of the free market" — Smith is using it as a metaphor for why consumers and manufacturers would prefer domestic goods to foreign ones, which (at least in his time) had less to do with market forces as societal forces such as difficulties in communicating.
• The meme of a hacker taunting, "Good luck, I'm behind seven proxies!" is actually properly, "I went through seven proxies — good luck!"
• John Tyner, the man who refused an airport security patdown, did not say, "Don't touch my junk." He said, "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested."
• The line "Here be dragons" is not used on early maps to denote unexplored areas. The practice probably derives from the original Roman HIC SVNT LEONES ("Here be lions") for bits they hadn't reached yet. The line HIC SVNT DRACONES only appears on the 16th century Lenox Globe, and is written off the coast of Asia, which was never really "unexplored" to begin with. (It may have been a reference to the Komodo dragon.)
• Dom Pérignon, namesake of the famed champagne, never said after inventing it, "Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!" He actually worked to prevent wine in the Champagne region from becoming sparkling wine, since it basically turned the wine bottles into grenades. It wasn't until the development of new bottles and better glassmaking techniques that sparkling champagne became standards — and that owes itself to the English, who loved the stuff. Indeed, the English wine merchants didn't let the French in on their little secret until late in Dom Pérignon's life. According to the Other Wiki, that quote came from a 19th century print ad.
• Saint Theresa of Calcutta never said: "Wherever I go in the whole world, the thing that makes me the saddest is watching people receive Communion in the hand." Fr. George Rutler, her interviewer, stated that she was actually gesturing with her hands to refer to people receiving Communion without any devotional spirit in them. The mistake distressed Saint Theresa, who did not want to be invoked in liturgical polemics, to the point that she personally came up to Fr. Rutler and demanded that he write a correction.
• Thomas J. Watson, CEO of IBM, did not say in 1943, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." There's no evidence he said it, nor the variant with fifty computers instead of five.
• Yogi Berra found himself the victim of this trope so many times that he titled one of his autobiographies I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said.
• William Randolph Hearst never told his reporter in Cuba, "You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war." While Hearst's newspapers did badger the U.S. government to declare war on Spain (especially after the sinking of the Maine provided a Casus Belli), there's little evidence that he gave this line, especially given that it would have been by telegram.
• Christopher Columbus:
  • He never claimed that he was trying to prove the Earth was round. This was known for centuries by then. The misconception was codified, if not invented wholesale, in the early 19th century by Washington Irving.
  • He never claimed he was sailing to India — he was aiming for "the Indies", which was how Europeans in his day referred to East Asia. He even had a letter in his entourage for the "Great Khan" of China. He did not mistake the Caribbean islands for India, but rather for a group of islands off of China. Columbus was working from a map drawn by mathematician Paolo dal Pazzo Toscanelli, which underestimated the size of the Earth and overestimated the width of Asia — but since Toscanelli was one of the greatest minds of the 15th century, Columbus never doubted the map and followed its instructions to the letter. He knew where he was latitudinally, anyway; he landed in the Bahamas and presumed he was around where Taiwan is.
  • A sort of inversion — it is occasionally claimed that Columbus did not call the natives Indios, but rather una gente in Dios, roughly "a people in God". But Indios is correct — Columbus was convinced he was in Asia. The "beamed up" version was invented by Russell Means in The '80s, and it's not grammatically correct Spanish.
• Harriet Tubman did not say, "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves." Blame Kanye West — he tweeted the line and attributed it to her. As one of the replies pointed out, not only did she not say this, the quote is pro-slavery — it implies that slaves deserved their condition because of their ignorance or inherent servility.
• Acclaimed football manager Jose Mourinho never referred to himself as "the Special One". He did say, "Please don't call me arrogant, but I'm European Champion and I think I'm a special one." While Mourinho has long been known as a self-promoter, calling oneself a special one has rather a different meaning from the special one. None of this stopped the press from referring to him as "the Special One" in subsequent years.
• The "instructions unclear" meme is often given in a very Beige Prose way — e.g. "Instructions unclear, dick stuck in toaster." But the original post that spawned the meme used normal English: "The instructions were unclear. I got my dick stuck in the toaster."
• The line in your car's wing mirror is not "Objects in mirror may be Closer than They Appear" — it's "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Which makes sense if you think about it — why would a mirror selectively render some objects closer and others not? It's uncertain how "may be" entered the popular consciousness, but some blame hypercorrect legalese (applying the same thinking to physics as to contracts), and others blame Meat Loaf's 1993 song "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are".
• The famous Zen koan is not "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It's entirely possible to clap with one hand by slapping your fingers against your palm (Bart Simpson did it!). The koan is more properly rendered, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?"
• Cracked has multiple articles stating various famous quotes were either actually never said by the person that it was attributed to or taken out of historical context.: "7 Famous Geniuses Everybody Quotes Incorrectly", "10 Historical Quotes That Everyone Gets Wrong", and "13 Famous Quotes We've Been Getting All Wrong". Unlike this Wiki, they like to keep track of the exact number of examples.
• Artist Marcel Duchamp did not say, "This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." The quote is based on a statement by Hans Richter; Duchamp's actual opinion was more positive.
• Former Manchester United star Roy Keane did not quite coin the term "prawn sandwich brigade", referring to spectators at a sporting event (especially football) who are more interested in corporate hospitality than in the game itself. While Keane was quoted in 2000 referring to "prawn sandwiches", it was the British media that took it and ran with it. Keane's full line was, "Away from home our fans are fantastic; I'd call them the hardcore fans. But at home, they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don't realise what's going on out on the pitch."
• The New York Times never called Meat Loaf "Mr. Loaf" in an article. While the Times has a reputation for being so genteel and fastidious in its use of honorifics that it might do so, the only time it ever did this was a self-reference — the headline of a 1991 film review that read, "Is He Called Just Plain Meat or Should It Be Mr. Loaf?" Nevertheless, "Mr. Loaf" had gained enough currency that by the time Meat Loaf died in 2022, it had long been a Running Gag in the Times newsroom and the paper explicitly clarified that it never happened.
• Karl Popper's oft-quoted "paradox of tolerance" is often (intentionally or otherwise) shortened to omit the part where he clarifies when suppression of intolerant ideas becomes necessary:
  Popper: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
• Crossing over with Mondegreen, people often misquote a certain meme as "green hair and pronouns", but the actual line, as confirmed by the original creator, is "Don't mind her, she has green hair and pronounce." As the creator explained, it's a reference to a meme on Twitter with the intentional typo "when she got pronounce in bio".
• In the United Kingdom, when a person is knighted they are never told to "arise, Sir (name)" during the ceremony after the sword is tapped on their shoulders. Nothing is said at that point — perhaps because nothing needs to be said.
• American women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony is sometimes alleged to have said "I would rather cut off my right arm than demand the ballot for the Negro!" (or some variation of that), which is often held up by modern-day critics as proof that she held racist views in spite of her support for gender equality. While this quote is mostly accurate, it's missing a few additional words, as well as some vital historical context. The quote comes from Anthony's authorized biographer Ida Husted Harper, who claimed that she said that "she would sooner cut off her right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for woman". In other words: she was stressing the importance of fighting against gender inequality and racial inequality. It's also important to note that when she (allegedly) said that, she was a prominent member of the American Equal Rights Association, a short-lived activist group that campaigned for equal rights for both women and African-Americans (Frederick Douglass was also a prominent member); and before that, she was a leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society. According to most reliable sources, the quote was in response to other members of the AERA urging her to prioritize anti-racist political causes over campaigning for women's suffrage—which she refused to do, considering both causes to be of equal importance.
• It turns out that Napoléon Bonaparte never famously (or infamously, perhaps) wrote to his wife Josephine, "Home in three days, don't wash.", as has long been reported.

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