Herald-Times (Bloomington, IN)   

As Plato famously said, 'Show me the money!'

Mike Leonard

One of author Ralph Keyes' favorite examples of the erroneous or spurious attribution of quotes is the oft-repeated line, "Show me the money!" from the movie, "Jerry Maguire."

Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus worked as a consultant for screenwriter and director Cameron Crowe and immediately took credit for the catch phrase when the film became a hit.

Agent Leigh Steinberg also worked as a consultant on the movie and told a different story - that he fed the gist of the quotation to Crowe, based upon what a client of his once said.

Crowe then went on record saying he formed Steinberg's nugget into the pithy "Show me the money!" The respected Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations credits Crowe.

"In fact," Keyes said from his Yellow Springs, Ohio, home last week, "that phrase shows up all over the place in newspapers from the early twentieth century. It's a boxer's catch phrase that's a century old."

Keyes explains all of this in his book to be released this week, "The Quote Verifier." He not only corrects the record on dozens and dozens of familiar quotes but in many cases takes the reader through the process he went through to discover the earliest author of various famous quotations, the first version of the quotation or to indeed verify that a famous quote did come from the famous person attached to it.

Keyes, a freelance author, delved into some of this territory with his previous book, "Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings and Familiar Quotations." The title refers to the genesis of the quote attributed to the legendary baseball manager, Leo Durocher, which most people know as "Nice guys finish last."

What actually happened, Keyes learned, was that Brooklyn Dodgers radio announcer Red Barber had asked Durocher why he couldn't be a nice guy for a change. Durocher reportedly pointed toward the New York Giants' dugout and said, "The nice guys are all over there - in seventh place." Over time, the comment evolved into the all-purpose quotation we commonly hear today.

That kind of editing is common with famous quotes. People intentionally or unintentionally improve or refine a memorable thought or phrase. Then, typically, the quote gets attributed to someone famous.

For example, various people have been cited as the author of the quotation: "No one on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time on my business'" The almost-accurate citation is former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, who died of lymphoma. Keyes tracked it back to a friend of Tsongas who made the observation to his terminally ill colleague and Tsongas repeated it.

"Famous quotes need famous mouths," Keyes observed. "Practically speaking, no one's going to say, 'In the words of Arnold Zack ...'"

"If you see something attributed to Lincoln or Churchill, be suspicious," said Anthony Shipps, the retired Indiana University librarian whom Keyes calls "the grand old man of quote verification."

Shipps' 1990 book, "The Quote Sleuth," reset the bar for accurate quote verification and illustrated just how lacking existing quotation resources had been. He's still working on his magnum opus, "Another Place to Look," but acknowledges that the research is tedious and slow-going.

"The thing most people don't realize is that sources such as Bartlett's or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are riddled with errors," Keyes said. "When I first got into this, I was surprised to find errors in those works. Now I know it's common knowledge among what I call quotographers that those publications do not live up to their reputations.

"There are a lot of things on those books that are good and right," said Keyes. "I like to tell people they're the best place to start, but not necessarily the best place to finish if you want to be certain."

Washington Post

Ask Not Where This Quote Came From

Ralph Keyes

Political figures routinely get their quotations wrong. No modern politician has stood out quite so much in this regard as John F. Kennedy. JFK loved to pepper his speeches and public statements with quotations. This not only perked up his prose, but improved his press by giving him an air of erudition. Kennedy was also, however, a misquoter of eloquence, who showed how creative and unreliable memory can be when using comments others have uttered.

Kennedy's main resource for quotations was his own memory and the notebook in which he'd jotted quotations and other material for years -- some drawn from books he'd read, but most from his mind. According to his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy "was the chief source of his own best quotations." As a result, he was an endless source of half-remembered quotations that his aides and Library of Congress staff members scurried to try to confirm.

With such a haphazard approach, JFK was not always as knowledgeable as he tried to sound. Before his wife, Jacqueline, corrected him, Kennedy combined lines by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost to conclude some of his speeches by saying:

I'll hitch my wagon to a star (Emerson)

But I have promises to keep (Frost)

And miles to go before I sleep (Frost)

Even though JFK routinely garbled his quotations, it took us years to figure this out. Meanwhile, the young president launched any number of misworded, misattributed or completely mystifying quotations into the public conversation that have stuck around to this day.

The most glaring example is "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," which Kennedy attributed to British philosopher Edmund Burke and which recently was judged the most popular quotation of modern times in a poll conducted by editors of "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations." Even though it is clear by now that Burke is unlikely to have made this observation, no one has ever been able to determine who did.

Some of Kennedy's most famous phrases turned out to have long, unacknowledged pedigrees. "The New Frontier," a phrase in Kennedy's 1960 acceptance speech that he later used to describe his domestic agenda, was the title of a chapter in a 1936 book written by Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon, who ran for president as a Republican that year. Two years before that, Franklin D. Roosevelt's future vice president, Henry Wallace, had written a book titled "New Frontiers."

The most stirring line of JFK's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," echoed similar exhortations made by many others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and President Warren G. Harding, who told the 1916 Republican convention, "We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation."

The inspiration for Kennedy's famous observation, "For of those to whom much is given, much is required" can be found in Luke 12:48: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."

And when the United States made Winston Churchill an honorary citizen in 1963, Kennedy said of Britain's former prime minister: "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." Nine years earlier, journalist Edward R. Murrow had said of Churchill, "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended."

Even when he did cite his sources, Kennedy routinely got them wrong. For example, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality" is a quotation he attributed to Dante. Dante did say some things about hell, but this wasn't among them. On another occasion, Kennedy quoted Emerson as having said, "What we are speaks louder than what we say," a condensation of Emerson's actual thought: "Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."

Journalist Sander Vanocur said Kennedy liked to quote British statesman Lord Morley's observation that "Life in politics is one continuous choice between second bests." No source can be found for this attribution. To make the point that we must plan not just for our time but for posterity, Kennedy would often quote "the great French Marshal Lyautey" who, he said, once asked his gardener to plant a tree. When the gardener cautioned that the tree wouldn't mature for a century, JFK said the marshal replied, "In that case there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon." Library of Congress researchers couldn't verify this story.

Nor could they find in Nikita Khrushchev's speeches or writings, "The survivors will envy the dead," an observation about nuclear war that Kennedy attributed to the Soviet premier during a 1963 news conference. (Three years before Kennedy so quoted Khrushchev, military strategist Herman Kahn had published a book on nuclear war in which he repeatedly asked, "Will the living envy the dead?")

But Kennedy did launch, if not originate, a number of comments that became standard parts of our lexicon. In a 1961 executive order, he referred to the need for "affirmative steps." This was the precursor to what came to be known as affirmative action. JFK also was the first U.S. official to talk about "light at the end of the tunnel" with reference to Vietnam, though the phrase was hardly original to him. And in a mid-1963 speech, Kennedy referred to the economic notion that "a rising tide lifts all boats," prefacing this thought with the words: "As they say on my own Cape Cod . . ."

Without claiming they were his own words, Kennedy put a number of quotations into play that were subsequently attributed to him. When taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he said, "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." (This saying had appeared in the published 1942 diary of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's foreign minister, then in the 1951 movie "The Desert Fox.") Similarly, in a 1961 speech, Kennedy said, "Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency," another now routinely credited to him, though of unknown origin.

One quip by JFK that has no known antecedent is his comment at a 1962 White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House -- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told author Thurston Clarke that his draft of Kennedy's speech for this dinner had included a tortured passage on Jefferson's many talents and achievements, and that Kennedy himself came up with the pithier, more memorable remark.

Toronto Globe and Mail   

Misquoting

Why is it so easy to get quotations wrong? "Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them," writes Ralph Keyes in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When. A good line -- such as "any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head" -- deserves a Churchill (or a Disraeli or a Bismarck), adds The Boston Globe reviewer. Unfortunately, the sentiment originated with a French statesman named Francois Guizot. Who wants to quote Francois Guizot?  - Michael Kesterton

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette   

Many Famous Lines Aren't Exactly What People Said, New Book Concludes  

Cristina Rouvalis

Say it ain't so.

A crestfallen boy didn't tell "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

And Mark Twain likely didn't coin "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

It wasn't Vince Lombardi who first proclaimed, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

At least that's the verdict of Ralph Keyes, a quote sleuth who examined the origins of 450 famous quotes in his new, entertaining book "The Quote Verifier." Many of the iconic quotes of our time were plucked from obscure people and placed in the mouths of famous people. Other quotes were edited from their original flabby form. And some seem to be journalistic wishful thinking.

People often hate to hear their favorite quotes besmirched or deconstructed into a blander form. That doesn't make Keyes, an author from Yellow Springs, Ohio, the most popular guy around.

"Writing books about verifying quotes doesn't get you invited to many parties," quips Keyes, who will offer his opinion of quotes only when asked.

Quotes often improve with age. "Memory may be a terrible librarian, but it's a great editor," to quote Keyes. (Accurately. Honest.)

The Andy Warhol quote, "Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame" was really the less pithy, "In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

Journalists, Keyes writes, often compress meandering quotes into perfect sound bites, and misquotes and misattributed quotes soar through cyberspace.

Leo Durocher is widely known for the quote, "Nice guys finish last." But did the Brooklyn Dodgers manager really say it?

Well. Sorta.

Keyes combed through microfilm of the July 1946 copies of New York's Journal-American to find the answer.

The league-leading Dodgers were about to play the seventh-place New York Giants, and Durocher ran down the Giant's bad record to a group of sports scribes.

When a radio reporter asked Durocher why he couldn't be nicer, the manager waved at the Giants' dugout and said, "The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place."

The next day, Frank Graham of the Journal-American wrote a column titled "Leo Doesn't Like Nice Guys." A reprint of the column in Baseball Digest said nice guys were in "last place," instead of "seventh place." Durocher's words were subsequently compressed into the very quotable "Nice Guys Finish Last."

"Verdict: Credit the concept to Durocher, its pithy version to the press," writes Keyes, who puts a verdict at the end of all the quotes he tracked down.

Some famous dead people, especially Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, are quote magnets.

Mark Twain was a supremely quotable guy who really did say "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

Keyes, who searched digital data bases and interviewed people for his research, also verified that Twain said, "When angry, count four; when very angry, swear."

But other droll lines have stuck to Twain without any proof he said them.

Keyes said the author of the "coldest winter" line could not be determined, and that despite exhaustive research, no one could ever find it in Twain's writings. But he said the quote may have stuck to him after Twain quoted an 18th century wit, who when asked if he had ever seen such a winter, replied, "Yep. Last summer."

So many zingers stuck to wisecracker Dorothy Parker that she once said, "I say hardly any of those clever things that are attributed to me. I wouldn't have time to earn a living if I said all those things."

Other people borrowed other people's quotes.

Turn-of-the-century aphorist Elbert Hubbard tweaked the famous George Bernard Shaw quote -- "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" -- and revised it, with unfortunate consequences to, "Folks who can, do; those who can't, chin."

"As someone said, he never learned to use quotation marks," Keyes said.

Sometimes a quote attaches itself to the person who personifies it.

The saying, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" has been attributed to Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, but it originated with UCLA football coach Red Sanders in the 1930s. "Unlike Red Sanders, Vince Lombardi took the winning-is-the-only-thing sentiment quite seriously," Keyes said.

Other quotes appear to be wishful thinking.

In 1920, when "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and other Chicago White Sox players were tried for intentionally losing the 1919 World Series for gambling purposes, a sportswriter quoted a little boy as asking Jackson outside the courthouse, "It ain't so, Joe, is it?"

That quote was polished to "Say it ain't so, Joe."

But other sportswriters present at the scene did not include any variation of the quote. And it's not the type of quote most reporters would gloss over. Jackson, himself, always denied it happened, later calling it "the biggest joke of all."

"Verdict: Joe said 'it ain't so' was never said, and he probably was right," Keyes writes.

The startling thing about this book is how few pure quotes exist. "It is rare to get the words right and the person right," he said.

He even points out what he considers mistakes in "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." But Keyes doesn't claim quote purity. He says he is sure that quote purists will challenge some of the calls in his book.

Everywhere around him, Keyes hears inaccurate quotes. Sometimes coming out of his own mouth. "I am the worst misquoter," he says.

Occasionally he is pleasantly surprised by a perfect quote, the rarest of things.

"I am not a big Newt Gingrich fan, but the other day I heard him say, as Lord Acton says, 'power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

"My jaw dropped. It was exactly right. No one ever remembers the 'tends to.'''

Seattle Times

Book Buzz: Get your quota of quotes

Thanks to "The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When" by Ralph Keyes (St. Martin's Press, $15.95), I may be as close as I'll ever get to finding out who first uttered my all-time favorite quote, which is:

"The road to hell

is paved with

good intentions."

Keyes writes that it's commonly attributed to Samuel Johnson, the second-most-quoted-Englishman after Shakespeare. But it's not original: Johnson's chronicler-biographer, Boswell, wrote it as, "Hell is paved with good intentions." However, "that thought was hardly original to him (Johnson), nor did he imply that it was," writes Keyes.

Other more authentic Johnsonisms include:

"No Man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

"I am willing to love all mankind, except an American."

Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times book editor

Denver Post

Bob Ewegen

Ralph Keyes's lovely little book "The Quote Verifier" attributes the famous line, "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small," to political scientist Wallace Sayre. Sayre, in turn, may have been inspired by Woodrow Wilson's observation that the intensity of the academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the "triviality" of the issues being considered.

Syracuse Post-Standard  

America's history is littered with misquotes

Frank Herron

Independence Day brings with it a celebration of this country's Founding Fathers and other giants of American history.

The reputation of these famous people is often based on the words they said.

But sometimes the famous words were never spoken by the famous mouth.

Enter Ralph Keyes - a self-styled "quotographer."

His latest book, "The Quote Verifier" (St. Martin's Griffin, $15.95), serves as a handbook for finding out who really said what - and when they said it.

Within its pages, readers can discover - if they can bear it - that some of the most treasured words need a new home. His book presents a mouthful of examples of quotes that have been incorrectly attributed to famous people.

Keyes calls some of these people "flypaper figures" because words tend to stick to them. Among these are Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and some lesser-known wits, such as Dorothy Parker.

For example, that's what happened to the phrase, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Although that statement is widely attributed to Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, Keyes shows that credit should go to football coach Red Sanders, who used the phrase as long ago as the 1930s.

Keyes acknowledges that many people are unwilling to accept the fact that Marie Antoinette didn't really say, “Let them eat cake” or that baseball coach Leo Durocher didn't say, “Nice guys finish last.”

Many people react by saying things like, “Leave us with our myths. Leave us with our, legends,” says Keyes, an Ohioan whose last name, he explains, rhymes with "buckeyes."

That kind of reaction is OK, up to a point, he said. He doesn't mind that someone in casual conversation says that George Washington said, “I cannot tell a lie”—even if that is, well, a lie.

“That's like the parking ticket of literary crimes, if that,” he says in a recent phone interview. “I think that's close to meaningless. Better to keep the conversation going with a misattribution than to stop and look it up in ‘The Quote Verifier.’”

But others need to be more careful, says Keyes, who has learned not to trust his own memory when it comes to quotations.

“If you're writing a work of scholarship or a book or a serious magazine article, you owe it to the reader not to pass off apocrypha as fact,” says Keyes, who gives a verdict for the source of each of the more than 400 sayings covered in the book.

Included among those quotations are some of the most famous statements of American history.

Here's a look at some of them, as presented in “The Quote Verifier”:

George Washington: “I cannot tell a lie.”

            This hallowed quote supposedly illustrates the from-the-cradle honesty of the first president. It's the key part of the story from Washington's youth, as told by biographer Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825). In it, a young, hatchet‑holding George nobly confesses to chopping down a cherry tree. Keyes quotes from the biography: “Looking at his father with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’”

             Keyes' verdict: “More Weems than Washington.”

Relax!

Not everything you've heard about famous sayings in American history is wrong. Ralph Keyes writes that Ben Franklin really should be credited with this: "Those who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

            Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

            Keyes says this statement is traditionally linked to an 1858 speech given by Lincoln in Clinton, Ill. There's no evidence of the statement in Lincoln's writings. Nor is it included in any known press account of his speeches Long after the fact, people recalled hearing Lincoln give a speech that dealt with the topic of how people are fooled. This maxim became part of Lincoln lore thanks mostly to a book published in 1904, “Abe Lincoln's Yarns and Stories.” In it, the author said Lincoln made the remark to a visitor. Keyes says Lincoln scholars give little credence to the Civil War president having made the statement.

            Keyes’s verdict: “Author unknown; probably not Lincoln.”

Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

            Supposedly, Henry made this famous statement at the end of a speech he made at the second Virginia Convention in March 1775. Instead, it is likely from the pen of Henry's biographer William Wirt, who based his attribution to Henry on the memory of two of Henry's contemporaries. Wirt apparently put, together the speech that now appears in published collections. The phrase is similar to a passage from “Cato,'” a play Joseph Addison wrote in 1713.

             Keyes's verdict: Credit William Wirt, with an assist from Joseph Addison.

             Ben Franklin: “We must all hang together, or most as­suredly we shall all hang separately.”

             Supposedly, Franklin said this as he signed the Declaration of Independence. But no contemporary accounts mention it. Evidence points, instead, to Richard Penn, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. A joke book printed in 1839 and a Franklin biography of 1840 put the statement in Franklin's mouth, and “there it has stayed,” Keyes writes.

             Keyes' s verdict: If it can be attributed to anybody, credit should go to Richard Penn.

San Diego Magazine 

Tom Blair’s - i ON SAN DIEGO

You Don't Say . . .

WORDSMITH: Ralph Keyes began his writing career in San Diego 30 years ago with a bestseller that was turned into a hit off-Broadway musical, Is There Life After High School? And he’s continued to mix scholarship with entertainment in a string of popular books, including Chancing It, Timelock and The Post-Truth Era. His newest, The Quote Verifier (St. Martin’s Griffin), traces the history of famous quotations. Packed with familiar lines that have become widely misquoted or falsely attributed, Keyes’ book is a delightful exercise in setting the record straight. Few readers will be surprised to learn that Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Yogi Berra are among history’s most oft-quoted figures. But it’s the anecdotal material the author provides that makes The Quote Verifier so readable. Of the 460 quotes included, Keyes discovered some two-thirds were either wrongly attributed or worded—including one of the most famous sports quotes of all: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” That bit of philosophy is routinely attributed to legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. But, says Keyes, it was used in a John Wayne movie, Trouble Along the Way, that was released in 1953, when Lombardi was still a rather obscure assistant coach at West Point. More likely, those words came from former UCLA football coach Red Sanders, although Sanders and Lombardi aren’t the only coaches who’ve been given credit over the years. Among the others: Michigan’s Fielding Yost, Maryland’s Jim Tatum, Alabama’s Paul “Bear” Bryant, Joe Kuharich of the Washington Redskins and Sid Gillman, the San Diego Chargers’ first head coach. If Gillman didn’t say it, he should have.

Bark 

Who Said That?

Ralph Keyes

We are no less likely to be vague about the origins of quotations about dogs than we are to be vague about the origins of quotations in general. Who said “Love me, love my dog”? Or that a man biting a dog is news? Was it Harry Truman who thought your only friend in Washington was a dog? Did Charles de Gaulle say that the better he knew men, the more he liked dogs? These were some of the questions that confronted me when I set out to explore the roots of familiar quotations. The answers were not always what I expected.

Love me, love my dog.

This has been identified as an old proverb, possibly Italian, or Spanish or French or English, or all of them. It is commonly thought to come from an 1150 sermon by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who referred to the saying as a proverb. (The dog breed was named after an earlier St. Bernard.) Sir Joshua Reynolds later painted a picture inspired by this saying, and P. G. Wodehouse wrote a story using it as his title.

Verdict: Proverbial wisdom publicized by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

When a dog bites a man, that isn’t news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.

By legend, this was the response of New York Sun city editor John Bogart (1845–1921) to a cub reporter who, in the early 1880s, asked him to define “news.” The author of a 1918 history of the Sun credited Bogart with this comment. It was recalled when he died in 1921. The observation has also been attributed to Sun editor Charles A. Dana; to its first managing editor, Amos Cummings; and to early-20th-century British press baron Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). Whoever first defined news as “man-bites-dog” may have got that notion from Oliver Goldsmith’s An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. In this 1766 poem, a kindly man in Islington is bitten by a dog whom he’d befriended. To the consternation of all, “The man recovered of the bite,/The dog it was that died.” This popular bit of doggerel was adapted in many forms, including one in which a man actually bit a dog. Lexicographer Eric Partridge believed that this might have inspired the classic definition of news.

Verdict: Someone at the New York Sun apparently said this in the late 19th century, John Bogart being the leading suspect, perhaps inspired by an Oliver Goldsmith poem.

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Truman Library archivists question the common attribution of this quip to the 33rd US president. They point out that Truman spent much of his young manhood on a farm, where dogs were helpers more than pets. Harry and his wife, Bess, had no particular fondness for dogs, and gave away the two that were given to them while they lived in the White House. So why is “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” so routinely attributed to Harry Truman? Because the script of Samuel Gallu’s 1975 play, Give ’em Hell, Harry, had Truman saying, “You want a friend in life, get a dog!” This script was subsequently published in book form. A few years later, New York Times correspondent Maureen Dowd attributed the remark to Truman (with “Washington” taking the place of “life”), as did President Bill Clinton. Clinton’s predecessor, George H. W. Bush, more accurately credited the quip to “some cynic.”

Verdict: An old saw put in Harry Truman’s mouth.

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.

This observation is generally credited to Charles de Gaulle, apparently on the basis of a 1967 attribution in a Time magazine article about a collection of the French president’s remarks. In centuries past, many other French natives have been credited with the same basic thought. They include the inimitable letter-writer Madame de Sévigne (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigne, 1626–1696), the revolutionary writer Madame Roland (Marie-Jeanne Philipon, 1754–1793), author-politician Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), author Alphonse Toussenel (1803–1885) and author Louise de la Ramée (1839–1908).

Verdict: Charles de Gaulle was the most recent spokesperson for a long-standing Gallic take on humanity.

From The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes. Copyright © 2006 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Buffalo News

Golf needs a fresh broadcasting swing

Jeff Simon

Mark Twain wasn't the one who first said that golf is "a good walk spoiled." That's the verdict of Ralph Keyes' "The Quote Verifier" (St. Martin's Griffin, 387 pages, $15.95).

Who did say it, then? According to Keyes, the first name that can actually be attached to it for certain (other than good old "anonymous") is German writer Kurt Tucholsky who wrote in the German periodical "Die Weltbuhne" "golf, sagte einmal jermand, is ein verdorbener spaziergang," which if you ask me doesn't quite have the same punch as what we've been attributing to Twain all these years.

Now that we've settled that, let's try this: golf is usually a crashing bore. And if you want, you can quote me.

I've always thought so.

People have tried to get me interested in golf my entire life. I caddied for my father and was allowed to play with him a couple of times. I could always be talked into hitting buckets of balls at the driving range or miniature golf.

The real game itself always bored the spaziergang out of me, whatever that is (a walk, I think).

I've sat at dinner with otherwise genial male family members talking about rounds of golf, hole by hole, that qualify as the most boring conversations I've ever listened to. That's because a lot of those conversations can be translated from fairway speak into "we're rich white guys and we can talk about anything we want."

Which is why golf, on TV, used to be excruciating.

And why Tiger Woods is the most amazing athlete you can watch on the tube. He is the first golfer to ever make me give a fig about the sport on TV.

You have no idea how much trouble this has caused me in life. The father of a girl I used to see a lot of in high school was always talking about watching Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player on TV, as if I were supposed to join in with trenchant comments. My life in that house would have been so much smoother if I'd just been able to fake it - at least a little. No such luck.

The PGA Championship begins on the tube this Thursday and, so help me, because of Tiger Woods and Tiger Woods alone, I may actually watch the final round next Sunday.

If Tiger's in it, mind you. Otherwise, fuggedaboutit.

This is one of the great TV storylines in American sports - the guy who, quite literally, began swinging a golf club on the "Mike Douglas Show" when the clubs were more than twice the size he was; the youngest guy to reach 50 major tournament wins at the Buick Open last weekend.

Woods is actually making TV golf exciting for me. You'd have to be made of stone not to be moved by the sight of Tiger sobbing in his wife's arms after winning his first major since his father's death.

It's the networks, I think, that ought to re-think entirely the way they cover the sport. The people who comment on golf may be the most boring white guys ever assembled in a room. Where are their Dizzy Deans? Or Howard Cosells? Or John Maddens? Where are the jokes? (Some of the funniest jokes I've ever heard about male obsessions and terrors are golf jokes.)

It's very simple: Golf now has a star you can watch and follow like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.

It's high time the networks threw country-club pseudo-gentility out the window and found a guy who could figure out a way to translate the best locker room ribaldry and raillery into acceptable PG-rated on-air palaver.

Otherwise, all we're watching is superstardom spoiled.

Lakeland Ledger (Florida)

The Last Word on Who Said It First

Lonnie Brown

The Coffee Guzzlers Club members had kindly asked our waitress for refills. "Show me the money," she mumbled on her way by.

Nevermore, the club's pet raven and mascot, provided some insight into the remark.

Quoth the Raven: "Cuba Gooding Jr. made the line famous in the 1996 Jerry Maguire movie. But actually, it has been around for a long time -- for more than 100 years."

As it turns out, the raven has been reading a new book by Ralph Keyes, "The Quote Verifier -- Who Said What, Where and When" (St. Martin's Griffin; $15.95).

In an interview last month with National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," Keyes said even the 17th edition of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" book attributes the quote to screenwriter Cameron Crowe.

That's probably because Crowe told ABC's Chris Wallace in an interview: "You're looking at the man who invented the phrase 'show me the money.' I deserve all the credit for it."

Not exactly, said Keyes. "There are a lot of databases now where you can enter key words and they'll take you back to early newspapers and early magazines. I did that and I found 'show me the money' was early boxer parlance."

Specifically, Jim Jefferies was asked in 1901 if he would fight Gus Ruhlin for the heavyweight championship. Said Jefferies: "Why, certainly, but I don't propose to fight him for 50 cents. They must show me the money."

Keyes said five years later, Battling Nelson, a lightweight champ, told a reporter he would "fight anybody if you show me the money." In 1907, heavyweight Tommy Burns was asked about fighting Jack Johnson. "Show me the money!" said Burns. "Show me the money and I'll fight if it's enough."

Keyes said his research often found good-sounding quotes that couldn't immediately be assigned to a speaker would drift about as "orphan quotes." Finally, they were given a personality.

If I said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," you might remember that the quote has been associated with the late Green Bay Packers' coach Vince Lombardi.

"It must have been Vince Lombardi," said Keyes. "Everybody's heard of him. It was actually Red Sanders, a coach in the early '50s at UCLA who originated that one. But who's heard of Red Sanders?"

Keyes found that many of Sanders' colleagues from the 1930s recall him using the phrase when he was was coaching highschool football in Georgia. In 1950, Sanders, then at UCLA, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: "Speaking about football victories, Sanders told his group, 'Men, I'll be honest. Winning isn't everything. [Long pause.] It's the only thing! [Laughter].' "

P.T. Barnum is often cited as saying, "There's a sucker born every minute." Keyes' book notes that Barry Popik, called "the restless genius of American etymology" by The Wall Street Journal, found three 1883 newspaper articles referring to "There's a sucker born every minute" as a saying popular among New York City gamblers.

Keyes said that one person did actually say a quote oft attributed to him -- but he said the nowfamous quote in the course of denying quotes that had been attributed to him.

"I really didn't say everything I said," said former New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra.

Lonnie Brown, The Ledger's associate editor, is interlocutor of the Coffee Guzzlers Club. The club motto this week is: "I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." (Keyes said Robert McCloskey, a State Department spokesman during the Vietnam War, actually made this statement to reporters.)

Galveston Country Daily News [Texas]  September 25, 2006

Whose quote is it anyway?

Cathy Gillentine

I got a new book at the Boston convention that I am just now getting around to looking at. It was worth the wait.

It’s called, “The Quote Verifier,” by Ralph Keyes, and it helps straighten out a lot of quotes we always are hearing, letting us know what’s really right, what’s only close to right and what’s completely wrong.

You may not care. But those of us who write stuff sometimes need to find out if what we are saying is really so.

One whole section is from the movies, so most of us are fairly familiar.

I remember “What a dump,” because Elizabeth Taylor says it in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and we all know she is quoting Bette Davis. But what movie? It was “Beyond the Forest,” in 1949. But it really began in 1945 in “Fallen Angel.” I didn’t know that.

Remember “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”? Strother Martin says it to Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke.” Only in the movie, Martin does not say the “a.” Instead, he just pauses.

Then there is, “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” In the book, author Mario Puzo has Don Vito Corleone saying, “I’m a businessman. I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Puzo then co-wrote the screenplay of “The Godfather” with director Francis Ford Coppola.

Going back much further in time, we remember a quote attributed to James Cagney, one of the classic gangsters. Impersonators “doing” him always say, “You dirty rat.” Cagney insisted he never said that. What he did say in “Blond Crazy,” in 1931, was “That dirty double-crossin’ rat.”

In his autobiography, according to Keyes, Cagney also relates he did not ever say, “All right you guys,” which he insisted sounded more like the Bowery Boys.

Equally false, said Charles Boyer, was his line “Come with me to the Kasbah.”

Some of you young whippersnappers don’t know what I am talking about, and equally so when I quote you, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Johnny Weismuller swears he never said that.

But you probably have all heard the most famous exit line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said by Rhett Butler at the end of “Gone With the Wind.” In the book, Rhett doesn’t say the “frankly,” which was probably added by screenwriter Sydney Howard.

Those of you who have lived only in this generation of filth won’t believe it, but it is true the censors tried to have the line changed to remove the “damn.”

We’ve all heard “don’t sweat the small stuff.” And the following “It’s all small stuff.” Ann Landers quoted it, but didn’t claim it. So, earlier, did Erma Bombeck. After lots of checking, our author found the source in a 1983 Time article dealing with stress, written by cardiologist Robert S. Eliot, who gets original credit.

Remember the reign of Ronald Reagan being called “the Teflon presidency?’’

The story goes that Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., was preparing eggs for her family’s breakfast in a nonstick frying pan and thinking, as she often did, about Ronald Reagan. “What was it that kept this bumbler from ever being penalized for his mistakes?” she thought. She looked at the pan. Reagan was just like Teflon. Nothing stuck to him.

She said much the same thing that same day on the floor of the House.

Nothing else stuck to Reagan. That one did.