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The misstep was probably inevitable, given the many comparisons made between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. With seven weeks to go in Obama's presidential campaign, the young candidate from Illinois inadvertently committed one of the most common sins in American politics—he used a phony Lincoln quote.
"Abraham Lincoln once said to one of his opponents," then-senator Obama asserted, "'If you stop telling lies about me, I'll start telling truth about you.'"
William Randolph Hearst, who ran for governor of New York in 1906, also liked that line. But it was Republican senator Chauncey Depew, another prominent New Yorker, who is actually the first person known to employ a version of the phrase to bash his opponents back in the 19th century.
John F. Kennedy was a repeat offender. In a 1963 speech, he misquoted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, warning Chinese leaders that in the event of a nuclear war, "the survivors would envy the dead." Kennedy twice gave Dante credit for the idea that "the hottest places in hell" are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis. But he made perhaps his most resounding misquote in a 1961 speech, when he credited British statesman Edmund Burke with saying, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Politicians—including presidents Ford and Reagan and, just this past year, Florida governor Charlie Crist—have repeated it ever since.
In fact, the "good men do nothing" line was voted the most popular quote of modern times by the editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. One Canadian minister even says the line inspired him to launch a charity devoted to stopping the slaughter and mutilation of Tanzanian albinos. But hold on—there's no evidence that Burke ever uttered these words. The Oxford editors have since fixed this error, sort of. They list the quote under Burke's name, along with the notation "attributed (in a number of forms) to Burke, but not found in his writings."
As for Kennedy's "Khrushchev" quote? It's from writer Herman Kahn's 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. And while Dante wrote about hell, he did not say anything about reserved seating for moral neutralists.
Why don't we check before repeating others' words? Why is it that when we do, we can no longer be sure that even the reference books are correct? What motivates speakers—presidents, college professors, actors, and everyday Americans—to blithely misquote, miscredit, and fabricate?
Reader's Digest has a particular interest in these questions, which we may as well get out of the way now. In The Yale Book of Quotations, published in 2006, editor Fred Shapiro sleuthed commonly misused quotes to their original sources. On numerous occasions, his search ended with a misattributed quote in our magazine. In recent decades, we've employed a diligent fact-checking team. But as penance for past sins, we offer the following handy guide.
Just as an exercise, go to your computer's search engine and type in four words: lie, truth, boots, and world. You will get thousands of references to variations of the following quote: "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." Most will cite Mark Twain as the author of this aphorism. Al Gore has given Twain credit for it. So has Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.
But Twain didn't say it. Charles Haddon Spurgeon did, in 1855, and he attributed the wisdom to "an old proverb." Spurgeon was a mid-19th-century British pastor, as famous in his time as Rick Warren and Billy Graham are today in the United States. But that's the thing about fame: It can be fleeting.
"The voters have spoken—the bastards" is a frequent laugh line at political dinners, usually attributed to Morris Udall. The witty Arizona congressman may well have said it after losing the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries, but Dick Tuck said it first, in 1966 (though his exact words were "The people have spoken—the bastards"). Who is Dick Tuck? Precisely. For the record, he's a now-retired political prankster.
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