Who Said It

Several of the most quoted lines in English have no author behind them. Voltaire never wrote that he would defend to the death your right to say it: his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it in 1906 as her own summary of his attitude, and it was later printed inside quotation marks. Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake; Rousseau put the line in the mouth of an unnamed great princess years before she reached France, when she was a child in Vienna. Edmund Burke is credited with the line about evil triumphing when good men do nothing, which is nowhere in his works. Darwin is credited with the one about the most adaptable species surviving, which was written by a management professor in 1963. And Machiavelli never wrote that the ends justify the means.

A quote drifts toward whoever is most famous for saying that kind of thing, and it rarely drifts back. Churchill collects wartime defiance, Twain collects wry one-liners, Einstein collects anything about intelligence, Lincoln collects moral seriousness and Oscar Wilde collects everything left over. The pattern is common enough to have a name: the writer Nigel Rees called it Churchillian drift. It works because attaching a big name is what makes an anonymous line worth repeating, and nobody who repeats it has any reason to check.

Almost certainly not, and saying it aloud in that room could have killed him. He had just been made to kneel and deny that the Earth moves, under the threat of torture, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The phrase does not appear anywhere until 1757, 124 years after the trial and long after every witness was dead. It survives because it is what everyone wants to have happened, which is the usual reason a quote survives.

The transmission carries that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, which as a sentence says step for mankind, leap for mankind and loses the contrast. Armstrong maintained he said for a man and that the article was lost in the radio link. A 2006 audio analysis claimed to find it and was quickly disputed by other analysts. NASA transcripts now print the a in brackets, which is roughly the state of the evidence: he meant it, and nobody can prove it reached Earth.

He said something that a translator rendered as we will bury you, at a reception in Moscow in 1956, and the American press read it as a threat of nuclear attack. The Russian idiom is closer to we will be present at your funeral, meaning we will still be here after you are gone. He was making the standard Marxist claim that capitalism would collapse of its own accord, and he said so explicitly in 1963: the point was the victory of a system, not the destruction of a country. The mistranslation shaped a decade of American politics.

Mostly by measuring the gap between the event and the first time anyone wrote the line down. A sentence recorded by somebody in the room is strong; a sentence that first appears forty years later in a biography is a reconstruction, whatever it is printed as. Then they check whether it turns up in the speaker's own letters or drafts, and whether an earlier version exists under somebody else's name. Patrick Henry's give me liberty fails the first test badly and is still, on the balance of evidence, close to what he said. Certainty is rarer than the quotation marks suggest.

More than you would expect. Juvenal's who watches the watchmen is not about political power; it is about hiring somebody to guard your wife and noticing the flaw. Hippocrates saying life is short and the art long was complaining that medicine takes a lifetime to learn, not encouraging anyone to seize the day. Horace's carpe diem comes from a poem about how little time there is. Terence's nothing human is alien to me is a nosy neighbour's excuse in a comedy. And when Shakespeare's Gertrude says the lady doth protest too much, protest means to promise emphatically, so she is complaining about extravagant vows rather than accusing anyone of denying something too hard.