Some of the most-shared quotes were never said by the people they are credited to. Here are the ones Wikiquote lists as misattributed, with what is known about where they really came from.
We rely on the notes and sources recorded on Wikiquote and show them next to each quote. “Misattributed” means the evidence points away from the credited person — it does not always tell us who did say it.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
No known citation to Marx. First appears unattributed in mid-1960s logic/computing texts as an example of the difficulty of machine parsing of ambiguous statements. Google Books. The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) dates the attribution to… Read the full notes
Letter purportedly written to his son, G. W. Custis Lee (5 April 1852); published in The New York Sun (26 November 1864). Although the “Duty Letter” was presumed authentic for many decades and included in many biographies of Lee, it was… Read the full notes
Derived from A Midsummer Night's Dream on p. 269, Aphorisms from Shakespeare (1812), Capel Lofft, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, a book which rewrites in aphoristic form Shakespeare quotations, in this case the exchange between… Read the full notes
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
The quote is widely misattributed to Galilei, but is actually from two French scholars, Antoine-Augustin Cournot and Thomas-Henri Martin. See "Der messende Luchs: Zwei verbreitete Fehler in der Galilei-Literatur" by Andreas Kleinert in… Read the full notes
The noblest motive is the public good.
"In The City of God Augustine quoted the line but changed the verb from the future to the present tense (vincet › vincit). That form became a traditional quotation, often reprinted and reproduced on medals, monuments, and family crests… Read the full notes
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change
Earliest sources found on google books date to 2013 (for example, p. 123 of Learning PHP Design Patterns), earliest version found on twitter is this tweet from January 2009, with the variant "intelligence is the ability to change your… Read the full notes
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Probably based on a similar quote about explaining physics to a "barmaid" by Ernest Rutherford | Page 418 of Einstein: His Life and Times (1972) by Ronald W. Clark says that Louis de Broglie did attribute a similar statement to Einstein |… Read the full notes
We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.
"[W]ith my vote, I want to support Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man—that the impending establishment of a government of the Hendersons will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will… Read the full notes
Nothing, that is morally wrong, can be politically right.
No citation to Gladstone found. Hannah More in 1837 in Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, The Works of Hannah More, Vol. 4, said the following on p. 179: "On the Whole, we need not hesitate to assert, that in the long… Read the full notes
According to Michael A. Ledeen, this line has been falsely attributed to Tocqueville by Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. See Tocqueville on American Character (2001), p. 25. Hillary Clinton in her… Read the full notes
As the law does think fit
No butchers shall on juries sit.
This quote, sometimes erroneously cited as from Churchill's The Ghost, is from canto II of Butler's Ghost; or, Hudibras. The Fourth Part (1682), a continuation by Thomas d'Urfey of Hudibras by Samuel Butler, the three parts of which were… Read the full notes
Often attributed to Stalin, there is not a single source which show that Stalin said this at any given time. The earliest source outside the blogosphere which attributes the quote to Stalin is the book Quotations for Public Speakers : A… Read the full notes
One must eat to live, and not live to eat.
L'Avare (1668), Act III, sc. i. | Firstly, an inaccurate sourcing: in Act III, yes—but in Scene I, no: rather, in Scene V—HARPAGON, VALÈRE, MASTER JACQUES (see, e.g., the Project Gutenberg HTML version of the English translation… Read the full notes
Mike Province, founder and president of The Patton Society calls this an urban legend and in the Texas A&M Battalion (2 October 2006) is quoted as saying "I've gotten e-mails and questions regarding that quote for several years... People… Read the full notes
When they get in trouble they send for the sons-of-bitches.
The alleged quote and King's reaction upon being told of it is further confirmed below Read the full notes
Actually the quote is not authentic but made up from a novel by Dmitri Merejkowski (w:Dmitry Merezhkovsky) entitled "The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci" (La Résurrecton de Dieux 1901), translated from Russian into English by Herbert Trench… Read the full notes
Attributed to Adams in A Brief History of Disbelief BBC Four (2005) by Jonathan Miller, Online video. The two sentences are derived from two different letters to Thomas Jefferson, written five years apart, juxtaposed to give a misleading… Read the full notes
When this you see remember me.
When I am dead and in my grave And all my bones are rotten, When this you see, remember me, Let me not be forgotten. Read the full notes
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
As quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine (July 1986) | As quoted in Built to Learn: The Inside Story of How Rockwell Collins Became a True Learning Organization (2003) by Cliff Purington, Chris Butler, and Sarah Fister Gale, p. 171… Read the full notes
Or: A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its old dimensions. | Actually by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, from "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table", originally published in The Atlantic, September 1858. Read the full notes