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.
The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.
Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually said by Earl Warren, as quoted in Sports Illustrated (July 22, 1968) Read the full notes
Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
Jean Kerr Misattributed In Finishing Touches (1973)
In Finishing Touches (1973), Act III, Kerr borrows this line (changing "we" to "you") from Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook (1963), ch. 5 Read the full notes
One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.
This quote was actually crafted by University College Dublin student Shane Fitzgerald. Shortly after Jarre's death, Fitzgerald uploaded the false quote to Wikipedia to test "how our globalised, increasingly internet-dependent media was… Read the full notes
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
Attributed to Laozi in self-help books and on social media, this quotation is of unknown origin and date. Read the full notes
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.
Very often attributed to Addison, this is in fact by Hugh Blair, published in Blair's Sermons (1815), Vol. 1, pp. 196-197. Read the full notes
The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.
No printed sources exist for this prior to 1965, when Dagobert Runes included it in The Jew and The Cross. It appears to be a paraphrase of Eight Homilies Against the Jews Read the full notes
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
He was actually quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., during an America's Town Meeting of the Air broadcast, at The Town Hall in New York City, (January 6, 1938) Read the full notes
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
Wooden only repeated a common aphorism (e.g. Interview on Charlie Rose, reported by Bill Walton), which was already in circulation as early as the 1920s, when he was a youth. Read the full notes
When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of "getting to know you" questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That's amazing! And I said, "Oh no, but I'm not any good at ANY of them."
Tumblr user three--rings responding on August 8, 2020 to a post of a letter by Vonnegut Read the full notes
We need a player who will be a fox in the box and on the pitch. We need a player like Owen is for Liverpool.
Thierry Henry, in an interview after the 2001 FA Cup final. (13 May 2001) Read the full notes
Today, America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the world government.
Henry Kissinger Misattributed This is widely reported on many sites as coming from the Bilderberg Conference (1991)
This is widely reported on many sites as coming from the Bilderberg Conference (1991) Evians, France, purportedly recorded by a Swiss diplomat, but no such recording has ever been provided. Read the full notes
The menacing threat has been repeated endlessly in U.S. corporate media in recent years: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” “Iran,” “Israel” and “wipe” in one form or another occur together in more than 17,000 articles in the Nexis news database over the last seven years. It plays a critical role in the case for pre-emptive war against Iran. There’s just one problem: It never happened.
Lost in Translation: Iran never threatened to wipe Israel off the map, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)(Multiple sources/explanations cited)(1 June 2012) Read the full notes
In an instant illumination can be achieved, it is as easy as turning on a light, the problem is finding the switch in the dark.
Jones Alami, in "Plasma Characterization & Thin Film Growth and Analysis in Highly Ionized Magnetron Sputtering" (December 2009) in Linköping Studies in Science and Technology, Dissertation No. 948. Read the full notes
I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.
but not found in his works and denounced by his personal secretary as a forgery Read the full notes
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free...
And feeling good was easy, lord, when he sang the blues.
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
"Me and Bobby McGee" another of her greatest hits, the song was actually written by Kris Kristofferson, and first released as sung by Roger Miller Read the full notes
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as per Mackay's The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 34. Read the full notes
Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.
Part of an unsigned foreword to Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, actually written by Andreas Osiander. Read the full notes
When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.
Dubious quotations Read the full notes
[O]ur forefathers retired God from politics…. The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others…. Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world.
Misquoted by David Barton in Original Intent (1996), splicing part of Individuality (1973) into a misquote of 1876 Centennial Oration (see above). Read the full notes
[F]or excellent reasons, [the government] has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call 'Military Targets'. I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples!
purportedly said in November 1941, circulated as early as 19 October 2017 referring to Portal as "commander-in-chief, British bomber command". This was due to a mis-reading of Selwood's Telegraph article from 2015 quoted below, due to… Read the full notes