Bundle Who actually said that Famous lines traced back to whoever really said them.
Finds
- "My Ignorance Is Just as Good as Your Knowledge" It is Asimov's, from Newsweek in 1980
- Life Without Love Is Like a Sunless Garden When the Flowers Are Dead Credited to Oscar Wilde, but the line surfaces only in 1949, nearly fifty years after his death
- Heaven Help America When She Loses Faith in Slogans Sir Josiah Stamp said it in 1932, with the Depression as his backdrop
- Blessed Are the Cracked, for They Shall Let in the Light Credited to Groucho Marx and Spike Milligan, but traced to a Dr. Parr in 1830
- It Is Impossible To Make Anything Foolproof Because Fools Are So Ingenious J. R. Williams drew it in a 1942 comic strip, fifty years before Douglas Adams got the credit
- Quacks Are the Greatest Liars in the World, Except Their Patients Franklin said it to Rush in 1788, and flagged it as somebody else's line
- The Most Common Way People Give Up Their Power Credited to Alice Walker since 1999 — and no one else has a stronger claim
- All true stories end in death Hemingway wrote a longer, better sentence
- It ain’t bragging if you can do it Dizzy Dean said something slower and better
- I find ecstasy in living Emily Dickinson said it out loud; a 1940 anthology turned it into a letter
- The shoeshine boy and the stock market Wall Street's favourite exit signal, traced to a book from 1959
- “When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them” Traced to a Wellesley commencement stage in May 1997
- When the bird and the book disagree A birdwatcher's proverb that Audubon never said
- Don't just do something. Sit there. Widely credited to Thich Nhat Hanh; first found in 1954, as orders written for men stationed alone on radar platforms at sea.
- No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood Credited to Ruskin and to Douglas Adams; actually Sydney J. Harris
- Samuel Johnson on Concentration The most quoted line about focus was cover for a forgery
- The People Have Spoken — The Bastards The best concession speech in American politics, possibly never conceded
- Kenneth Boulding on how things got that way A one-line theory of everything
- Moritz Goldschmidt on seeing the world The oldest source for a much-misattributed line
- Philipp von Jolly: "In physics, almost everything is already discovered" Quote Investigator traces the famous 'physics is finished' line — usually attributed to Lord Kelvin — to a paraphrase of Philipp von Jolly's advice to a young Max Planck.
- Victor Borge: "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people" Quote Investigator traces the famous Borge line to a 1972 appearance — the canonical attribution holds up, surprisingly.
- "Do Not Confine Your Children to Your Own Learning" Quote Investigator traces a parenting line often misattributed to Tagore
- "Nobody Notices When Things Go Right" Quote Investigator traces Zimmerman's Law of Complaints to 1978
- Boulay de la Meurthe — "Worse than a crime; it was a blunder" Not Talleyrand, not Fouché, not Napoleon
- Stendhal — "God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist" Quote Investigator nails the 175-year provenance
- Wayne Dyer — "Change the way you look at things" Not Max Planck, despite what the internet insists