Quotation: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

Ambrose Bierce

Perish the man who said our good things before us.

Donatus

 

1: Why We Misquote

W. C. Fields's best remembered saying is "Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad." Fields didn't say it. These words were said about Fields, by Leo Rosten, as he introduced the comedian at a 1939 Masquers banquet in Los Angeles. Rosten, then a young sociologist studying the movie industry, found himself seated on the dais. After the meal he was invited to say a few words about the guest of honor. Unable to think of anything else, Rosten blurted out, "The only thing I can say about Mr. W. C. Fields, whom I have admired since the day he advanced upon Baby LeRoy with an icepick, is this: Any man who hates babies and dogs can't be all bad." According to Rosten his quip brought down the house. He later called it "one of those happy 'ad libs' God sends you." Two weeks later Rosten's line was mentioned in Time . At the time few people had heard of Leo Rosten. As a result, it didn't take long for Rosten's words to get put in a better-known mouth: that of Fields himself. It's stayed there ever since.

But Rosten deserves credit for this line, right? Well, not exactly. In November, 1937 -- nearly two years before the Masquers banquet -- Harper's Monthly ran a column by Cedric Worth about a New York cocktail party which took place in 1930. This party was dominated by a man who had a case against dogs. After leaving, Worth found himself in an elevator with a New York Times reporter. As the elevator made its way to the ground the reporter observed, "No man who hates dogs and children can be all bad."

To be accurate, therefore, reference books should attribute "No man who hates dogs and children can be all bad," to the Times reporter. His name was Byron Darnton. Byron who? That's just the point. Who's heard of Byron Darnton? Yet most of us know the name W.C. Fields. This is why Fields routinely gets credit for someone else's words. He probably always will.

The case of W.C. Fields is surprisingly common. Even our most hallowed phrases are routinely misremembered. Many of our best known quotes have been inaccurately recorded, attributed to the wrong person, or both. In the course of this project I've discovered hundreds of examples of misquotation which I'll discuss in chapters to come. For example:

• "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" was the slogan of UCLA football coach Red Sanders, not Vince Lombardi.

• "The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings" was adapted from an older saying: "Church ain't out till the fat lady sings."

• "Elementary, my dear Watson," does not appear in any of Arthur Conan Doyle's books about Sherlock Holmes.

• Calvin Coolidge didn't say, "The business of America is business."

• Leo Durocher never said "Nice guys finish last."

As long as there have been quotes there have been misquotes. As a general rule: Misquotes drive out real quotes. This is the Immutable Law of Misquotation. Misquotation takes three basic forms: 1) putting the wrong words in the right mouth; 2) putting the right words in the wrong mouth; and, 3) Putting the wrong words in the wrong mouth.

During the hearings about Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden quoted Shakespeare as saying, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming pointed out (correctly) that it was actually playwright William Congreve who wrote:

In the same play -- The Mourning Bride -- Congreve also wrote, "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast" (not "beast").

In his 1713 play Cato, Joseph Addison wrote "The woman that deliberates is lost." Reflecting our changing values, history first revised this to, "She who hesitates is lost," then, "He who hesitates is lost."

Many of our most cherished sayings have been re-worded by our memories. In the process many are improved. "When in Rome do as the Romans do", for example, is a terser, more pointed version of what St. Ambrose was said to have advised St. Augustine in 387 A.D.: "If you are at Rome, live after the Roman fashion; if you are elsewhere, live as they do there."

Misquotations often improve on the original. Like pebbles polished by ocean waves, common usage tends to edit, smooth and update original versions of popular sayings.

Common	Original
Don't look a gift horse the mouth.	Never inspect the teeth of a gift horse.
There is safety in numbers.	In the multitude of counselors there is safety
Necessity is the mother of invention.	...the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention
If the shoe fits, wear it.	If anyone fool finds the Cap fit him, let him wear it.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.	Would both eat your cake and have your cake?
To gild the lily.	To gild refined gold, to paint the lilly...

The latter is from Shakespeare's King John. Shakespeare could be history's most misquoted figure. He wrote so many quotable lines that it's easy to attribute all manner of orphan comment to him; anything that "sounds" Shakespearean. Anyone quoted as often as the Bard is bound to be misquoted. For example:

Popular	Actual
Discretion is the better part of valor.	The better part of valor is discretion... (Henry IV)
There's method in his madness.	Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. (Hamlet)
Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him well.	Alas! poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. (Hamlet)

The reason we misquote Shakespeare so routinely is that we generally consult our memory for quotations. Memory alone is a notoriously undependable work of reference. Novelist Evan Hunter discovered this when he wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "I believe it was Joseph Conrad who told us, "Never trust the teller, only trust the tale." In fact, as a reader pointed out, it was D. H. Lawrence who wrote, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." Hunter's version actually improved the original. And Conrad wasn't a bad guess; just not an accurate one. Evan Hunter let his memory be his guide and came up with a two-fer misquote.

Quoting from memory is like playing "Telephone," the game in which a comment passed from mouth to ear along a line of children ends up totally distorted by the end. This process can be seen at work in one of the most re-quoted sayings of our times: Andy Warhol's remark that in the future we all would be famous for 15 minutes. Warhol's actual words, in the catalog of a 1968 exhibition, were, "In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes." Along the way something often got lost in transmission. Dozens of variations I've seen on this theme include:

"Now that everyone seems to have been famous for five minutes, as Andy Warhol predicted."

"You know what Warhol said about everybody in America being famous for ten minutes...."

"What did Andy Warhol say -- that everyone gets 15 seconds of fame?"

...Andy Warhol's prediction -- that everyone will be a celebrity for 15 seconds -- has come true with a vengeance."

"In art, everyone should be famous for 15 minutes."

"Everybody is famous for 15 minutes."

"'In the future,' the artist-seer Andy Warhol has promised, 'there won't be any more stars. TV will be so accessible that everybody will be a star for 15 minutes.'"

Warhol's famous phrase is cited and mis-cited so often that it suffers double-trouble: garbling the words, and their source as well. As his memory fades we tend to talk about "15 minutes of fame" and skip attribution altogether. That's how the pros do it. An axiom among public speakers is this: the first time you use a quote, introduce it by saying, "As Joe Doe once said...." The second time, "It's been said that..." The third time, "As I've often said...."

Think of this as Three-Stage Quote Acquisition. Harry Truman was a master of the art. To explain his decision not to run for re-election in 1952, Truman quoted his old friend Harry Vaughan: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." A few months later Truman said in a speech, "The President gets a lot of hot potatoes from every direction and a man who can't handle them has no business on the job. That makes me think of a saying that I used to hear from my old friend and colleague on the Jackson County Court. He said, 'Harry, if you can't stand the heat you better get out of the kitchen." Eight years later Truman wrote in his autobiography, "I used to have a saying that applies here and I note that some people have picked it up: 'If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

By now Harry Truman is generally considered the author of this familiar saying. He has also been credited with such quips as "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right," and "It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own." Both are old saws that were hardly original to Truman if he ever said them at all. But because they "sound like" him, and he is well known to us, Truman's name has routinely been attached to words that weren't his. This is a common fate of public figures. For years I quoted Lincoln's apology for writing a long letter: he hadn't the time to write a short one. After undertaking this project I learned that French philosopher Blaise Pascal made that observation three centuries ago. I also learned that Mark Twain never said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco as I'd always believed (and often said).

This is how misquotes get born and perpetuated: Someone -- ourself, say -- wants to make a point during a conversation, a speech, or in a piece of writing. That person recalls a quotation which illustrates the point perfectly. Not being sure of the exact wording, the quoter uses the closest remembered version. He or she may also not be sure exactly who said the words in question, but -- because they sound like Truman or Twain or Lincoln or Churchill -- the quoter puts the quote in the mouth of a plausible noted figure; the one it most "sounds like."

While reviewing Mikhail Gorbachev's years in power, ABC-TV's Ted Koppel concluded, "All in all, Gorbachev personified John F. Kennedy's definition of courage: a man who showed grace under pressure." You can see what the writer of Koppel's line must have been thinking. Courage; John Kennedy wrote a book on courage; the classic definition of that quality must have been his. It wasn't. Ernest Hemingway defined "guts" as "grace under pressure" in 1929, when John Kennedy was 12 years old.

This is the "sounds like" syndrome. Sayings of uncertain origin are routinely put in the mouth of the best known person they most sound like. Comments having to do with shady showmanship, for example, are routinely attributed to P.T. Barnum. "There's a sucker born every minute," is so commonly credited to him that it's entered the category of "everybody knows Barnum said it." He didn't. Barnum Museum curator Richard Pelton calls this "one of the few things he didn't say." No modern biographer of Barnum takes this common attribution seriously. Among other things, the word "sucker" was not that common during the flamboyant showman's heyday. "Humbug" was. Barnum used this word frequently, once saying "the people like to be humbugged." Another early American term for a gullible hick was "jay." A popular nineteenth century song included the line, "There's a new jay born every day." This could have inspired the modern version so commonly attributed to P.T. Barnum.

In his own search for the origins of "there's a sucker born every minute," Barnum biographer Arthur H. Saxon came up with two other possibilities. One was in an unpublished manuscript by Joseph McCaddon, the brother-in-law of James Bailey (of "Barnum & Bailey"), and no friend of Barnum's. Dismissing any thought that Barnum ever said a sucker was born every minute, this manuscript attributed that sentiment to a notorious con man of the early 1880s named Joseph Bessimer. According to McCaddon, a New York police inspector said Bessimer told him, "There is a sucker born every minute, but none of them die." This was the first time that the inspector had heard the expression. Alternatively, Barnum's rival Adam Forepaugh reportedly observed that a sucker was born every minute during a newspaper interview. Asked if he might be quoted, Forepaugh replied, "Just say it's one of Barnum's slogans which I am borrowing for the occasion. It sounds more like him than it does me, anyway."

All of these leads probably include elements of the truth. "There's a sucker born every minute," most likely grew out of the earlier "jay born every day" saying. The new version undoubtedly was popular among late nineteenth-century con men. After it showed up in newspapers, the saying made its way to P.T. Barnum's lips, helped along by those who wished to imply he was a con. Not that help was needed. These words just sounded so much like Barnum that we naturally assumed he'd said them. We still do.

"Never give a sucker an even break," is sometimes attributed to Barnum too, but no more accurately. "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right," also gets credited to the spiritual father of modern public relations, but with no more evidence than the sucker statements. This p.r. commonplace has also been attributed to turn-of-century Tammany Boss Timothy "Big Tim" Sullivan, Boston Mayor James Curley, fight promoter Chris Dundee, showman George M. Cohan and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn as well as Harry Truman. It's one of those nostrums which has been around as long as there was publicity to be garnered, and whose original author will probably never be known. But because it "sounds like" Barnum/Sullivan/Cohan/Goldwyn, "just spell the name right" gets pinned on one of them whenever we feel the need for a likely suspect as the source of that comment.

No source of modern quotations is cited more often, and more erroneously, than Winston Churchill. An Englishwoman I know once observed that "England and America are two countries divided by the same language." Her American husband added, "Yes. Churchill." Good guess. This certainly sounds like Churchill. In fact, however, that line is an orphan which is most often credited to George Bernard Shaw.

After filling his chest with air, a Philadelphia radio announcer intoned, "As Winston Churchill always said, 'Luck is the residue of design.'" Baseball mogul Branch Rickey would have been surprised to hear his credo attributed to the British Prime Minister. But lots of orphan quotes end up in Churchill's mouth. Churchill himself once apologized for misattributing a quote by saying, "I am reminded of the professor who in his declining hours was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations.'" This pithy anecdote made Churchill's point perfectly. The only problem was that it was apocryphal. Oxford professor Martin Joseph Routh was once asked what advice he'd give young scholars. "You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!" said Routh (who was still far from his deathbed). Churchill might have borrowed his garbled version of Routh's advice from an 1897 speech by the Earl of Rosebery, who referred to "the advice given by one aged sage to somebody who sought his guidance in life, namely, 'Always wind up your watch and verify your quotations.'"

We seldom need to do the former any more, and rarely do the latter. Among other things, it's not possible to verify quotations completely. Short of owning tape recordings of original quotations made at the time they were uttered, one can only make educated guesses about what's actually been said, and by whom. You would think that in an era of videotape, audio tape and databanks that misquotation would decline. It hasn't. Even where accurate quotes are available -- of movie lines on film, comments made on taped tv shows, or quotes taken from original pieces of writing -- misquotes remain as common as ever. This is because our ability to find the exact wording and source of familiar quotations is beside the point. The point is to have things that need saying said by someone we've heard of. Accuracy is secondary. A pithy, pertinent misquote is preferred to one which is correct but tortured. Famous comments such as "Say it ain't so, Joe," or "Don't trust anyone over 30," gain widespread currency because they express so well a thought already on many minds. Whether such words were actually said, or by the person we thought said them, is beside the point.

When Muhammad Ali refused induction into the Army, he was widely quoted as saying, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." This was a perfect marriage of anti-war and anti-racist sentiment. Better yet, it came straight from the mouth of a mega-celebrity thought to possess primitive folk wisdom. The only problem is that Ali never made this comment. "It's wasn't really his mind-set to say something in that way," explained Ali biographer Thomas Hauser. "The companion thought of that comment is 'people call me nigger in this country every day.' I never heard Ali say 'white people in this country call me nigger.' He would attack racism. But he wouldn't personalize it." Despite extensive searching by himself and others, Hauser has never found the source of "no Viet Cong ever called me nigger." He concluded that it was just one of those things that got picked up and passed around in the 60s. It was a comment we wanted Ali to make so badly that we made it for him.

A few years earlier, a similar fate befell General Motors President Charles E. Wilson. The comment for which we best remember Wilson is "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." That observation captured perfectly the smug arrogance of corporate titans. During General Motors's downsizing in the early 1990s, this famous, fatuous remark was dusted off by commentators who wanted to portray GM's attitude in a sound bite. But this is not what Wilson said. While testifying about his nomination as Secretary of Defense before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on January 15, 1953, Wilson was asked whether he could make a decision on behalf of the government which would adversely affect General Motors. "Yes, sir," Wilson replied, "I could. I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." This is similar to the more popular version, but not the same at all. We prefer the misquote, however, so that is the version which has stuck in the public mind.

Footnote: in the 1939 movie Stagecoach, a corrupt banker said: "And remember this: what's good for the bank is good for the country."

Wilson's familiar misquotation is a good test of quote collections. Many still include the classic version. Others give varying reports of what they think Wilson said, and a range of dates and settings. Through its 15th edition in 1980, the venerable Bartlett's Familiar Quotations not only got Wilson's words wrong, but the year in which he said them (they thought it was 1952) and the setting too (Bartlett's reported that Wilson testified before the "Senate Armed Forces Committee." There is no such group). Their misreporting of his words -- "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the Country." -- first appeared in Bartlett's 1955 edition, duplicating the version in Clifton Fadiman's An American Treasury which came out the year before. The Harper Book of American Quotations repeated Fadiman's and Bartlett's errors in 1988. Other quote collections are all over the board on what they think Wilson said, when, and where.

Relying on quote collections for accurate wording and citation is problematic. Their compilers have so many thousands of entries to include that they can't possibly verify each one. In addition, quote compilers are promiscuous borrowers. As a result, errors wend their way from one collection to another. In one amusing example, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations quoted Ulysses S. Grant as saying "I purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." (emphasis added) A few years later the Macmillan Dictionary of Quotations had Grant purposing to do the same thing. So did The Bully Pulpit , a compendium of quotes by American presidents.

No book of quotations -- including this one -- can hope to be 100% accurate. The best one can hope for is to minimize errors. Quote collectors are humble people. They have to be. We usually start out planning to tease every entry back to its original source. It doesn't take long to realize that this is an impossible dream. While producing a quote collection for the Library of Congress, Suzy Platt said of verifying its contents, "it really opened my eyes to the fact that you can't be totally sure."

New York Times columnist William Safire devotes more effort than the average quotemonger to determining who actually said what. He too has concluded that one can never be sure. In his columns and books, Safire takes pains to point out that any attribution of a quote must be considered tentative. Among other reasons, the readers Safire calls his "gotcha gang" love nothing better than calling gaffes to his attention. Safire's British counterpart, Nigel Rees -- host of a BBC radio program called "Quote ... Unquote" -- says his golden rule is this: "it is very dangerous ever to say that a particular person coined a phrase or that it came about in a definite way. There is almost always an example of earlier use. The furthest it is safe to go is to say that a certain person has popularized the phrase at a certain time."

Consider "You can never be too rich or too thin." This maxim is associated with any number of wealthy, skinny women. It has been attributed to Rose Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, the Duchess of Windsor and Babe Paley. (The last two most often.) In the early 1970s the Duchess of Windsor, had it inscribed on a throw pillow. No matter how rich and thin she may have been, the Duchess was not particularly clever and is unlikely to have coined this phrase. Babe Paley is a more promising candidate. The comely wife of CBS founder William Paley was known for her tart tongue. But no credible evidence exists that she coined this remark. The most likely candidate of all is one to whom the maxim is seldom attributed: Truman Capote. According to quote maven Alec Lewis, Capote said he observed you can't be too rich or thin on "The David Susskind Show" in the late 1950s (probably 1959). Since kinescopes of Susskind's shows are tied up in litigation, this cannot be confirmed. Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke told me he has no evidence that the writer originated this phrase, but that he very well might have. Capote was close to Babe Paley and could have fed her the line.

As you can see, teasing quotes back to their original source is no easy task. But it's fun, and illuminating to try. That's what this book is: a literary detective game. It's something I've been engaged in for the past two decades. That quest has taken me to the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, many smaller libraries, the Museum of Broadcasting, Theater Collections in New York and Philadelphia, movie studios, correspondence collections and various archives. Whenever possible I've written, called, and interviewed principals in person.

The fruits of my quest are gathered in this book. In it I've tried to take a fresh, skeptical look at many of our best known phrases, sayings and quotations. Are we sure that the words are accurate? Why? What is their source? Is that source primary or secondary? If the words are accurate, who said them? How do we know? What was the context? By trying to answer such questions, my hope has been to produce a book which is interesting to read and useful as a work of reference. In the process I've discovered that even well-known quotes are routinely mis-worded, misattributed and mis-cited in existing works of reference. This is why in the Source Notes I only give an original source as my reference when I've actually examined it. (Otherwise the citee is cited.)

The hardest task of all is to ascertain how a real quote became a misquote. Confirming that one person borrowed someone else's remark doesn't tell you whether that comment was original in the first place. It's also far easier to prove who didn't say something than to say who did. "There are a surprisingly large number of Americanisms which never passed the lips of those to whom they are attributed," noted Suzy Platt of the Library of Congress. "How this manages to occur is always slightly inexplicable. The words do indeed strike a chord of truth with many of their audiences (regardless of who said them first), but without the cachet of the national figure, lose some of their impact in the dialogue."

Take "You can't trust anyone over 30." Abbie Hoffman, right? Or was it Jerry Rubin? Mario Savio? Mark Rudd? All of them have been given credit for this clarion call of the 1960s' student revolt. None actually said it, at least not first. The man who first publicly advised his peers not to trust anyone over 30 was Jack Weinberg. Remember him? Hardly anyone does. That's why we so routinely put Weinberg's words in better known mouths.

Here is how his motto became part of the national discourse: As student protests heated up at the University of California in 1964, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter named James Benet went to Berkeley to do a feature story on this new phenomenon. Jack Weinberg, then 24, was one of the dissidents Benet interviewed. Weinberg got the impression that the reporter was trying to bait him; to get him to admit that revolt was part of a Communist conspiracy. To get under Benet's skin, he said, "We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30." Twenty-six years later, now long past 30 himself, Weinberg told me that those words just occurred to him on the spot. He thought they were original to him. Calling them a "movement saying" was his way of trying to give them more zing. Weinberg succeeded in getting a far bigger rise than he'd intended. After appearing in Benet's article, his comment was repeated by Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason. Soon it was buzzing all over the Bay Area, then around the country as a whole. Weinberg's generational red-lining touched a nerve among over-30s. It confirmed their worst fears about how they were perceived by their children. When student activists realized how much this motto bugged their elders, many began to repeat "don't trust anyone over 30" in earnest. Before long this became the defining slogan of an era when surly youth were seen as rudely elbowing their parents aside. In Weinberg's words, "The phrase just resonated."

Among the few 60s rebels to stay active in social causes (Greenpeace, most recently), Weinberg was chagrined that his most lasting to fame is this puerile remark. "It's a bit disappointing," he has observed, "that the one event that puts me in the history books -- the one thing people ask me to comment on -- is an off-the-wall put down I once made to a reporter." To make matters worse, the reporter he was trying to put down as a reactionary turned out to be a veteran of progressive causes himself.

Once Weinberg's slogan caught on, more prominent movement members began to get credit for it. Weinberg thought that Abbie Hoffman encouraged this process, but doesn't think Jerry Rubin did. (In his book Growing (Up) at 37 Rubin refers to himself as "someone who had helped popularize the slogan "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30.'") How did he feel about so seldom getting credit for his own catch-phrase, juvenile as it might be?

"Amused?" said Weinberg.

"It's certainly nothing I felt real possessive about," he added. "I felt some of the people who claimed it deserved it more. It was more meaningful to their lives. At the same time there's a certain sense of wanting to set the record straight. Even though it's not something that's central to my life, I guess there's some need to be remembered for something."

There are reasons that misquotation is so common. Certain things need to be said at certain times, and said by someone we've heard of. This is not a random process. Two axioms govern the process of misquotation. These axioms are:

1) Any quotation which can be altered will be.

2) Famous quotes need famous mouths.