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
- There Will Never Be a Robot, a Tireless Mechanism Performing All the Functions of a Man A 1927 New York Times science writer called robots impossible, and Chesterton doubted a robot schoolmaster
- Art Is Born of Constraint, Lives by Struggle, and Dies of Freedom André Gide said it in 1904, citing a flaw in Michelangelo's marble
- The Day Came When the Risk to Remain Tight in a Bud The line everyone credits to Anaïs Nin has no evidence behind it
- Annie Murphy Paul on Thinking Outside the Brain On the mind as a magpie — thought assembled from whatever the world has to offer.
- Fernando Pessoa on Being Tourists of Ourselves On the difference between visiting yourself and exploring yourself.
- A World Market for About Five Computers The most-quoted bad prediction in computing has no source
- Too-Ticky on uncertainty "All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured"
- 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.
- Samuel Johnson on Concentration The most quoted line about focus was cover for a forgery
- Amelia Earhart on the cake bakers A 1932 award speech that turned a backhanded compliment into a rebuttal
- The People Have Spoken — The Bastards The best concession speech in American politics, possibly never conceded
- Echoes of Genius: Enduring Wisdom from Great Minds A self-published quote book arranged as a perpetual calendar