Avoiding Misquotations
Nothing spices up a speech better than an apt quotation. Someone else’s words help to reinforce your ideas, boost your credibility and demonstrate your learning. However, delivering a misquotation quickly undermines your credibility and can make you appear foolish. We live in a time when the audiences can instantly fact-check a speech on their always-on, internet-enabled mobile devices. So it pays to double-check each quotation. And it’s very easy to misquote famous people. In many cases, well-known quotes were never uttered.
Writing in today’s Financial Times, John Kay lists a series of misquotes that, while common currency, are not accurate. For example:
- “Play it again, Sam” — was never spoken by Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, in Casablanca.
- “My only regret in life is that I did not drink more champagne” — were not British economist John Maynard Keynes’ dying words (he said this at a Cambridge University event while in rude health).
- There is no evidence that Oscar Wilde ever said “Youth is wasted on the young.”
- Winston Churchill never said “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Nor did he say “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
There is, however, a valuable resource at Quote Investigator which examines the validity of famous quotes.
Unfortunately it groups quotes by speaker, not by topic. This means it’s not as useful as sites like Brainyquote and Wikiquote for finding a quote on a specific topic. But it’s well worth checking into the origins of any quotation you do plan to use on Quote Investigator, or just browsing for inspiration.
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Thanks Ian. This is one of my pet peeves. I really like it when speakers take the time to get their quotes right and to do their homework.
By Daniel Kingsley on 04.08.16 10:38 am
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