In fact, it is said to be one of the most popular quotes in history and has been attributed to several different people. Kennedy attributed the phrase to Edmund Burke, 18th-century Irish philosopher, politician and statesman, but it cannot be verified in Burke’s case. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” John F. Besides, most likely, Marie Antoinette was not being sarcastic but spoke from the ignorance of a sheltered royal who didn’t know what was going on. Nitpicking, you say? A quotation is important when summing up the character of an individual. The closest we can get is a 1791 quote from Jean-Jaques’ Rousseau in which he attributed the phrase “Let them eat pastry” to the queen. “Let them eat cake,” words that are supposed to have led to the demise of the French aristocracy, probably never passed Marie Antoinette’s lips. When we were using printed quotations from books, arriving at an original source was harder than it is with the internet at our disposal.įor instance, Vince Lombardi, award-winning National Football League coach, did not originate the phrase, “Winning isn’t everything it’s the only thing.” Lombardi did use that phrase as early as 1959, but it actually came from UCLA coach Red Sanders in 1950. This seemed a good place to start when talking about misquotations and wrongly attributed quotations because it is embedded so deeply in our culture, with people willing to swear they heard it themselves.Īnyone who writes for a living has probably assigned quotations to the wrong person or mangled the language in which they were said. In the 1942 film “Casablanca,” Ingrid Bergman never said, “Play it again, Sam.” What she said was, “Play it, Sam.”
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