Ten Misquotations and Misattributions

From History

Some of history’s famous quotations are misquotations and misattributions.

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 If you Google the first 10 or 12 words of this quotation along with “Lincoln” you will find an array of Internet sources that report the statement as authentic. Lincoln never said nor wrote it. The quotation is “the most notorious of the widely used and still current but false (Lincoln) quotations,” writes quote maven George Seldes, who notes that the statement first emerged in the 1880s, many years after Lincoln’s death, during the Populist movement, when there was “Greenback agitation for ‘paper’ money as a panacea against ‘Wall Street’ monopoly.” (That said, Lincoln was probably familiar with Karl Marx, likely reading him in the 1850s when Marx had a column in the popular and influential New York Daily Tribune.) (See “The Great Quotations” compiled by George Seldes [1960, p.  22], “Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery” by Hermann Schluter [1913, p. 170], and analyses by W.J. Ghent in Collier’s Weekly [April 1, 1905], and Reinhard H. Luthin in Saturday Review [February 14, 1959]. See here for Lincoln pieces at this website.)

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“Let them eat cake.” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”) – Marie Antoinette

There is no evidence the queen of France said this. The author Rousseau used the phrase circa 1770 in a critique of the ancien regime and it became associated with the hated queen. In a letter to the Times of London in 1959, reader John Ward stated that the gist of the remark is “many centuries older than Marie Antoinette or Rousseau. It is to be found in the Latin letters of Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the thirteenth century. It is not there attributed to any particular person, but it is referred to as a proverbial example of the ignorance of the rich concerning the lives of the poor.”

A precise evocaton of this theme – a perfect update of the slander of Marie – came in the 1990s and ’00s with a remark attributed to singer Mariah Carey: “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.” Carey didn’t say it, but an online publication called Cupcake put the words in her mouth in a satirical piece, Vox magazine repeated the satire and labeled it true, and the remark soon hit the mainstream press – the Independent in Britain picked it up, as did Ms. magazine and Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle. (For the full story on the Mariah Carey “quote” see Snopes.com. For the cake quote see “Did Marie-Antoinette Really Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake?'” at Britannica.com.)

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“The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” – The Duke of Wellington

What the Iron Duke actually said during a visit to Eton in his old age was, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won.” Close enough, maybe, except for the fact that he was apparently not referring to organized sports, which is how the remark is generally interpreted, but to an Etonian tradition of unorganized, bloody, after-hours fistfights and pummelings on the playing fields, that, on one occasion, killed a boy. In 1951, Gerald Wellesley, seventh Duke of Wellington, said it’s “entirely unwarranted” to depict his ancestor as an admirer of organized games (however, he had no problem with brutal pummelings). (See Time magazine, 8/27/1951; a letter to the editor by David Callaway, New York Times, 8/16/1995; and Daniel W. Graf’s review of “Tannenberg: Clash of Empires” by Dennis E. Showalter, The Journal of Military History, January, 1992.)

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“I have not yet begun to fight!” – Capt. John Paul Jones

In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, as the U.S. ship The Bonhomme Richard, captained by Jones, absorbed a pounding from the Royal Navy’s Serapis, the British captain shouted to Jones an invitation to strike his colors – to surrender. Jones reply was, roughly, “No! I’ll sink (or, “I may sink”) but I’m damned if I’ll strike!” Not bad, actually, but not good enough for Jones’ first lieutenant, Richard Dale, who, more than 40 years later, transformed the reply into “I have not yet begun to fight!” Dale’s version was published in an 1825 biography of Jones by John Henry Sherburne. (Dr. Benjamin Rush also contributed to the re-working of the Jones statement.) Jones went on to win the battle, the first major triumph of the American Navy. (See “John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography” by Samuel Eliot Morison [1959] and “Sea Raiders of the American Revolution: The Continental Navy in European Waters” by E. Gordon Bowen-Hassell, Dennis M. Conrad, and Mark L. Hayes [2004].)

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“War is hell.” – Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

Sherman said something close to this, but not exactly this, in a speech on August 11, 1880, in Columbus, Ohio, to several thousand veterans of the Civil War’s Grand Army of the Republic. (Some sources, apparently inaccurate, say the speech was delivered in Michigan in 1879.) The most solid version of his remarks, according to historian and journalist Lloyd Lewis, is this: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror, but if it has to come I am here.” Lewis writes, “….His words, shortened to ‘War is hell,’ gradually spread over the world to become one of the most widely known statements by an American. Where or when he had said it was forgotten. Years later, he could never remember having said it at all; he supposed he might have. It was certainly what he thought; but he guessed it was just a popularization of the phrase he had written during the Civil War struggle: ‘War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.'” (See “Sherman: Fighting Prophet” by Lloyd Lewis [1932; 1993 new edition]. See Wikiquote for all versions.)

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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Voltaire

This much-quoted sentiment should be attributed to author Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who used the phrase as a description of Voltaire’s attitude in her book “The Friends of Voltaire” (1906). Hall wrote under the pseudonym S.G. Tallentyre. She said the quote is “a paraphrase of Voltaire’s words in the Essay on Tolerance – ‘Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.'” (See “The Friends of Voltaire” by S.G. Tallentyre [1906; 2003 new edition].)

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“A chicken in every pot; a car in every garage.”– Herbert Hoover

Hoover denied saying any such thing. A version of this quotation appeared in a political ad in the New York World in 1928 when Hoover was running for president. The comment has deep roots: Henry IV of France (1553-1610) once said, “I wish that there would not be a peasant so poor in all my realm who would not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.” As William Safire notes of political discourse, “Most of the seemingly ‘new’ language is surprisingly old.”

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“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton

Acton (1834-1902), born John E.E. Dalberg, was an English historian and statesman. The actual quote is “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (Included in an 1887 letter.) The word “tends,” often left out today, is crucial. With it, Acton seems to salute the handful of historical leaders who walked away from power, or put strict limits on their love of it, such as George Washington, Marcus Aurelius, and Cincinnatus, contrasting them with such figures as Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Acton is saying that walking away from power can be done. The founders of the U.S.A., led by Washington, focused intently on the fact that the walk must be made if the republic is to thrive, and that, down the road, people might be tempted to cling to power illegally.

Acton uses “corrupts” not in the sense of accepting bribes but to describe a coarsening of the heart – a crimping of one’s ability to see, sense, and gauge what’s really going on with people, situations, and opportunities – the unfolding of a gauzy veil between oneself and reality – the forging of internal ego-based armor against openness and its attendant vulnerability – a succumbing to the “dark bloom of entitlement,” to use a phrase of writer and editor Charles Monagan, that can affect anyone who gives orders and/or gets accustomed to seeing people jump, from emperors to presidents to money managers to office managers to parents. The 19th century theorist and revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “There is nothing more dangerous for personal morality than the habit of giving orders.”

Additional Acton quotes: “Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.” “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

Pope Alexander VI circa 1500: “The most grievous danger for any Pope lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth.”

A corollary to Acton’s Law (or a parody) is called Prichard’s Law: “Absence of power corrupts, and total absence of power corrupts totally.” 

Good scholarly studies have been done of the psychology of power, of the exact ways power corrupts. In his book “Humankind: A Hopeful History” (2019), historian and writer Rutger Bregman summarizes: “(People in power) literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant and rude than average, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives….Power appears to act like an anaesthetic that makes you insensate to other people.” (By the way, Bregman eviscerates a famous study of power, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Wikipedia has an article about this 1971 social psychology study; note the section “Critiques of Scientific Validity.”)  

Acton is a fascinating figure. See his page on Wikiquote and also pages 35 to 38 of “The Great Quotations” compiled by George Seldes (1960). For a mention of Prichard’s Law see “Journals 1952-2000” by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (2007) p. 480.

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“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

The accurate quote is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana, a poet as well as a philosopher, surely paid attention to creating a crisp and memorable bite in the sentence by using the twin “k” sounds, “cannot” and “condemned.” Slightly inaccurate versions abound, including “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” and “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (See “The Life of Reason” by George Santayana [1905] and Wikiquote.org.)

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“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong

Armstrong’s 1970 book “First on the Moon” renders his famous words as noted here – “a man” – but he’s misquoting himself in order to look good, according to Snopes.com. Armstrong actually said, on July 21, 1969, what everyone thinks he said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – he forgot the “a.” In his book, he tries to re-write history by including the missing “a.” NASA agreed to lie on his behalf, says Snopes.com – the agency “obligingly provided the cover story that ‘static’ had obscured the missing word.” There’s no good evidence for the static notion, says the website: “….the word ‘man’ follows immediately on the heels of ‘for,’ with no gap between them into which Armstrong could conceivably have inserted the word ‘a.'” In the fullness of time, Armstrong admitted his mistake, saying “I blew the first words on the moon….” (See Snopes.com.) ●