The shelf of no
A quotationary earns trust by disappointing a familiar misquote. These are lines the world repeats, and the trail back to what was actually said.
Usually given to Mohandas K. Gandhi
This sentence does not appear in Gandhi’s collected writings. The closest documented sentiment is from a 1913 note: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.” The bumper sticker is a paraphrase that wandered off.
Usually given to Albert Einstein
No letter, paper, or interview supports this. It circulates in recovery literature and on posters from the late twentieth century, decades after Einstein’s death. He did write, dryly, about not fooling yourself with a beautiful theory. That is a different sentence, and a better one.
Usually given to Winston Churchill
On May 13, 1940, Churchill told the House of Commons he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The familiar version drops “toil” and adds an “and” that was not there. The rhythm people remember is real. The inventory is not.
Usually given to Marie Antoinette
The line is “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” and it appears in Rousseau’s Confessions, written years before Marie Antoinette arrived in France, as the words of “a great princess” he does not name. No contemporary account puts the sentence in her mouth. It survived because it was useful to her enemies.
Usually given to Julius Caesar
The Latin is Shakespeare’s, in Julius Caesar. Ancient reporters, if they give Caesar any last words at all, give a Greek phrase: “Kai su, teknon?” — “You too, child?” Suetonius also says Caesar died without speaking. The stage line is magnificent. It is not minutes.
Usually given to Voltaire
Written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906, in her book The Friends of Voltaire, as a description of his attitude. She put it in quotation marks, and the marks escaped into history. Voltaire was a fierce defender of speech. He did not mint this epigram.
Usually given to Edmund Burke
Not found in Burke. The line he did publish, in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), is sterner and more specific: when bad men combine, the good must associate, or fall one by one. The modern version is a smoothing of that paragraph.
Usually given to Maya Angelou
Angelou repeated versions of it late in life, and so the line attached to her. The earliest solid printing is from Carl W. Buehner, a Mormon church leader, in a 1971 collection of sayings. Angelou’s own books hold sharper sentences under her own name.
Usually given to A feminist proverb, author unknown
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote it in 1976, in a scholarly article about Puritan funeral sermons. She meant that quiet women are left out of the record, not that misbehavior is a strategy. The slogan shaved off both the historian and the argument.
Usually given to Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories
Doyle’s Holmes says “Elementary” and he says “my dear Watson.” He never says them together. The fused catchphrase comes from later stage and screen adaptations. The stories are full of better sentences.
Usually given to The Apollo 13 crew
Jack Swigert, and then Jim Lovell, said: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Past tense, on April 14, 1970. The film Apollo 13 moved it into the present. The real wording is calmer, which is how trained people sound when the spacecraft is failing.
Usually given to The Bible
The First Letter to Timothy says “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” Not money itself, not the only root, and not quite “all evil.” The shortened proverb is a different theology.
Usually given to Charles Darwin
Herbert Spencer coined the phrase in 1864, after reading On the Origin of Species. Darwin later used it, with credit, in the fifth edition. Darwin’s own closing sentence is not a slogan about winners. It is about endless forms, most beautiful.
Usually given to Oscar Wilde
No Wilde play, essay, or letter contains it. It shows up on merchandise in the late twentieth century. Wilde’s actual epigrams are meaner and more exact, which is why they lasted in the first place.
Usually given to Harriet Tubman
The second sentence has no nineteenth-century source. It flatters a modern idea and puts it in her mouth. What she did say, late in life, was plainer and prouder: she never ran her train off the track, and she never lost a passenger.
Usually given to A coincidence of April 23, 1616
Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, in Spain, which had adopted the Gregorian calendar. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, in England, which was still on the Julian calendar — ten days behind. The shared date is a trick of the almanac, not one day in the history of the world.
Usually given to Leo Durocher
In 1946, talking about the New York Giants, Durocher said something closer to: the nice guys are all over there, in seventh place. A headline tightened it into a proverb. He spent years saying he had been misquoted, which did not stop the proverb.
Usually given to Galileo Galilei, leaving his trial in 1633
The Italian “E pur si muove” is not in the trial record. It surfaces much later, in a 1757 miscellany. The story is too good, which is why it stuck. The canon keeps the sentence and marks it disputed, rather than dressing a legend up as minutes.
Usually given to Socrates
Plato’s Apology is more careful. Socrates says he is wiser than another man only because he does not claim to know what he does not know. The proverb sands that down into a paradox he did not mint. In the same dialogue he does say that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Usually given to Aristotle
Will Durant wrote that gloss in The Story of Philosophy (1926), summarizing the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s own claim is plainer: moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. The modern line is a good sentence. It is Durant’s.
Usually given to W. B. Yeats
It is not in Yeats, and it is not in Plutarch, though both names are regularly conscripted. The image turns up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and goes looking for a famous author. Yeats has lines that do not need the help.