Table Of ContentTHEY NEVER SAID IT
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THEY NEVER SAID IT
A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes,
and Misleading Attributions
Paul F. Boller, Jr.
John George
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1989
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petalingjaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1989 by Paul F. Boiler, Jr., and John George
First published in 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1990
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boller, Paul F.
They never said it : a book of fake quotes, misquotes, and misleading
attributions / Paul F. Boiler, Jr., and John George.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Quotations. 2. Errors and blunders, Literary. 3. Literary
curiosa. 4. Literary forgeries and mystifications. 5. Quotation.
I. George, John H. II. Title.
PN6081.B635 1989
082—dc 19 88-22115
CIP
ISBN 0-19-506469-0 (Pbk)
681097
Printed in the United States of America
For Treva JOHN
For Don Worcester PAUL
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Preface
Using quotations is a time-honored practice. There have al-
ways been people who liked to liven up what they were say-
ing with appropriate statements from the writings of others.
This was true even in ancient times; Plato used quotations
freely, and Cicero's letters are full of quotations. Today, how-
ever, quotations tend to be polemical rather than decorative.
People use them to prove points rather than to provide plea-
sure. As a forensic device, quote-using has become practically
indispensable to teachers, preachers, politicians, educators,
columnists, editorial writers, commentators, and panelists who
are called upon—or who go out of their way—to discuss po-
litical and social issues in public. What has been called
"quotemanship" (or "quotesmanship")—the use and abuse
of quotations for partisan purposes—has during the past few
decades become a highly refined art in this country.
Quotemanship, like Stephen Potter's one-upmanship, in-
volves gambits and ploys and countergambits and tricks and
traps and ruses and ambuscades. Quotemen (and quote-
women) do not simply quote; they quote in order to score
points, usually of a political nature, and thereby throw their
opponents off balance. Sometimes they merely quote a highly
esteemed authority—Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson—in order
to bolster their own position. Other times they do much
better than this: they dig up a statement which their oppo-
nent once made that clearly supports their own particular
position. And if they are really lucky, they may be able to
come up with some kind of gaffe—a fatuous remark or state-
ment revealing ignorance or prejudice—that casts doubt on
viii Preface
their opponent's honesty, integrity, and good judgment.
Looking for gaffes has become a major feature of recent
American presidential campaigns.
But some quoters are not satisfied with gaffemanship; nor
do they regard themselves as bound by the customary rules
of civilized discourse. They engage in what writer Milton
Mayer once called "contextomy": cutting a statement out of
context (e.g., John Adams on religion) in order to give a
completely misleading impression of what some famous per-
son believes. And some polemicists go even farther than this;
they deliberately make up statements out of whole cloth for
use in advancing their own position and damaging that of
their opponents. In the 1950s Wisconsin Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy became a master of the contrived quotation. On
March 30, 1950, he delivered a long attack in the Senate on
the Far Eastern policies of the Roosevelt and Truman admin-
istrations, during the course of which he tried to discredit
Owen Lattimore (who had been director of Pacific Opera-
tions, Office of War Information, during World War II) by
reading the following statement from a letter he said Latti-
more had written in 1943: "Fire from the O.W.I. any man
who is loyal to Chiang, and hire individuals who are loyal to
the Communist government." But when his fellow Senators
asked to see the letter from which he read his quotation, Mc-
Carthy said it was "secret." It turned out that he had simply
made up the quote on the spot.
Few quote-mongers are as audacious as Senator McCarthy.
Most of them invent their quotations in the quiet of their
offices or the shelter of their homes rather than in public.
But many of them are just as unscrupulous as the Wisconsin
Senator. They enjoy putting words into the mouths of fa-
mous people, particularly the long-departed, and then citing
these words with an air of authority in their earnest little
books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and leaflets. Some
of the quotes they make up pass into general circulation and
are accepted as authentic by the general public. On occasion
Preface ix
even serious scholars and conscientious public officials are
taken in by them. In September 1985, President Ronald
Reagan made innocent use of an old-time fake quote from
Lenin in one of his speeches: "First, we will take eastern
Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the
United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism.
We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit
into our hands." Lenin was a zealot when it came to com-
munism, but he was not stupid. And he simply wasn't given
to making fatuous remarks like the one about overripe fruit.
The overripe-fruit statement is just one of a host of phony
Lenin quotes that have been making the rounds in this coun-
try since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But there are also
plenty of fake Lincoln quotes in circulation. And there are
spurious quotes, too, from Franklin, Washington, and other
notables that turn up periodically in books, pamphlets, maga-
zine articles, and public addresses. Some of these quotes, to be
sure, originated in misunderstanding or carelessness in re-
porting; and some of them (like the quotes about George
Washington's piety) in wishful thinking rather than in malice.
And there are plenty of harmless concoctions (we have in-
cluded a few) which have been put into the mouths of celeb-
rities, mainly show people, by publicity agents and gossip
columnists, in order to jazz up their public images. Harm-
less, too, are the misattributed quotes (like the one about the
weather that Charles Dudley Warner, not Mark Twain, really
made), and the misquotes (like Churchill's "blood, sweat, and
tears"), which are sometimes improvements on the original.
But a lot of the phony quotes assembled here were delib-
erately manufactured with malice prepense; the quote-maker
simply wrote out a statement of his own, put quotation marks
around it, and attributed it to someone else. And his aim was
to mislead, not amuse.
When Emperor Charlemagne died in 814 and no comet
appeared, chroniclers simply invented one and inserted it
into history, for comets in those days were closely associated
