12 Famous Quotes Everyone Gets Wrong
Some of the most quoted lines in the language were never said by the person credited with them — and several were never said at all. Here are twelve that almost everybody gets wrong, and what the record actually shows.
Twelve quotes everyone gets wrong
- “Let them eat cake” — not Marie Antoinette. The line appears in Rousseau’s Confessions, attributed to an unnamed “great princess”, written when Marie Antoinette was a child and years before she arrived in France.
- “Elementary, my dear Watson” — not in the books. Holmes says “Elementary” and he addresses “my dear Watson”, but the famous sentence appears nowhere in Conan Doyle’s stories. It comes from later stage and screen versions.
- “Luke, I am your father” — the line is “No, I am your father.” Perhaps the most confidently misremembered sentence in cinema.
- “Play it again, Sam” — never said in Casablanca. Ilsa asks him to “play it once, Sam”; Rick says “play it”. The tidied-up version came afterwards.
- “Money is the root of all evil” — missing three words. The verse is “the love of money is the root of all evil”, which says something rather different.
- “Blood, sweat and tears” — Churchill said four things. The speech offers “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. Toil is the one that always gets dropped.
- “Houston, we have a problem” — past tense, actually. The transmission from Apollo 13 was “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. The film tightened it.
- “Beam me up, Scotty” — not said in the original series. Plenty of close variants, never that exact line.
- “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” — almost certainly not Einstein. It is attached to his name everywhere and appears nowhere in his writing; versions of it show up in recovery literature decades later.
- “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” — not traceable to Edmund Burke. Endlessly credited to him, and not found in his published works.
- “Well-behaved women seldom make history” — not Marilyn Monroe. Written by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in a scholarly article, as a serious observation about who ends up in the historical record.
- “First they came for the socialists…” — Martin Niemöller, and the list varies. He recited it in different forms over the years, which is why no two versions you see quite match.
Why misquotes spread so well
Usually because the wrong version is better. It scans more neatly, lands harder, or sheds the qualifier the original carried. And attaching a line to a famous name gives it borrowed authority — which is precisely why Einstein, Churchill and Twain have collected so many quotations they never produced. If a quote sounds a little too perfect for the person credited, it is worth a check.
One quote worth carrying, every day
That is the idea behind Quote This Day — a free Android app that hands you one carefully chosen quote each day, clean and distraction-free. Save the ones that land, revisit your favourites, and share them with someone who needs to read them today.
More on the app: the Quote This Day page.
Frequently asked questions
Did Marie Antoinette say “let them eat cake”?
Almost certainly not. Rousseau tells the story of an unnamed princess years before she came to France, and there is no contemporary evidence she ever said it.
Did Sherlock Holmes say “elementary, my dear Watson”?
Not in Conan Doyle. He says “Elementary” and he says “my dear Watson” — just never together in that famous form.
Why are so many quotes attributed to Einstein?
A famous name lends a line instant authority, and quotations drift towards the most quotable person available. Einstein, Churchill and Mark Twain are the usual magnets.
What is the actual Apollo 13 line?
“Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The present tense came from the film.
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