Who Said It?

The source: “The Quote Verifier” by Ralph Keyes, in ___The Antioch Review___, Spring 2006.

As Mark Twain never put it, “Quotations are only as good as the writers who invent them.” And “there’s the rub,” as William Shakespeare did write (_Hamlet_ 3.1.65), although who’s to say he didn’t cadge that line from someone else?

Ralph Keyes, whose work as the author of such books as _The Wit and Wisdom of Harry Truman_ (1995) and _The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde_ (1999) has made him a quote sleuth, says there are many reasons why “accurate ascription of quotations is such a slippery slope of scholarship.” Take Leo Durocher’s famous saying, “Nice guys finish last.” What Durocher actually said was “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.” The more familiar quote is, as Keyes writes, “boiled down to its essence,” just like “blood, sweat, and tears” sounds better than Winston Churchill’s original: “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

At least those flawed sayings are associated with their originators. Misattribution of quotes is just as common as misquotation, reports Keyes. On the eve of the war in Iraq, for instance, the familiar quote “No plan survives contact with the enemy” was much bandied about by commentators. It was ascribed, variously, to Dwight Eisenhower, Napoleon, and George Patton. Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke (1848–1916) was the actual originator, though, like Durocher, von Moltke didn’t put the thought in very pithy form.

President John F. Kennedy was a serial misquoter. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” he ringingly declared, (mis)citing Edmund Burke. It certainly _sounds_ like something Burke might have said, and Kennedy’s imprimatur has kept that fiction alive. (The true provenance of the quote is unknown.) Keyes says many misquotes follow patterns. If it’s something saintly, then Gandhi said it (or Mother Teresa). “If it’s about honesty, Lincoln most likely said it (or Washing­ton), about fame, Andy Warhol (or Daniel Boorstin), about cour­age, John Kennedy (or Ernest Hemingway).” Parochialism also plays a role. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” said football coach Vince Lombardi (if you’re American) or soccer coach Bill Shankly (if you’re British). “Golf is a good walk spoiled” is “given to Mark Twain in the United States,” says Keyes, and to “author Kurt Tucholsky in Germany.”

Newspaper reporters routinely improve the grammar, diction, and, yes, the thoughts of those they quote: Vice President Jack Garner compared his office to “a pitcher of warm piss,” but in the newspapers it was sanitized to “a pitcher of warm spit.” And while such misquotes might have had limited reach in former times, today the Internet does more to abet misquotation than contain it, spreading each error like a “verbal virus.”

But there’s nothing new about misquotation. The New York wit Dorothy Parker was so often credited for things she didn’t actually say that the playwright George S. Kaufman once lamented, “Everything I’ve ever said will be attributed to Dorothy Parker.”