They never said that.

Why it stuck Wesley quoted the line as "an old adage." It is not biblical; Jewish and Christian sources use similar language.

Why it stuck Descartes wrote it first in French. The Latin tag philosophy books quote is from his later Meditations.

Why it stuck Emerson's adjective matters: he defends reasoned consistency, attacks only the foolish kind. Drop "foolish" and the quote praises changeability for its own sake.

Why it stuck "Care" in Elizabethan English meant worry or sorrow. The shift to "curiosity" happens around 1898 in American newspapers — different warning, same rhythm.

Why it stuck Carroll wrote the exclamation as deliberately bad grammar — Alice catches herself in the next beat. The isolated phrase has become a normal English intensifier; Carroll's joke is gone.

Alice apologises to herself for the mangled double-comparative, then forgets and keeps using it.

Why it stuck Hume's "then" — the connective particle — is usually dropped. In context, he's drawing a conclusion from the preceding argument, not making a standalone pronouncement.

The loss of "then" is the philosophical loss: Hume's point is argumentative, not declarative.

Why it stuck Witness-reconstructed after Mobile Bay, 1864. No primary transcript; Farragut himself never published the line.

Why it stuck Not in Twain's writings. The phrase comes from a 1987 country song by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh.

Why it stuck The doubled "danger" is a later parody invention. The show's Robot warned once — the second "danger" came from comic sketches in the 1970s.

The Robot's actual name in the show is simply "Robot." The flapping arms and the chest panel are reconstructed memory.

Why it stuck Churchill was quoting — "it has been said" — not coining. The attribution has stuck anyway. The short form drops the double distancing and makes Churchill the author.

Which "it" Churchill was referring to is unknown; the underlying sentiment had been circulating in English journalism for decades.

Why it stuck Thomas used the adjective "gentle," not the adverb "gently," deliberately making "gentle" parallel to "good" ahead of "night." The -ly flattens the grammar.

The poem is a villanelle for Thomas's dying father. The misquote turns a refusal of death into a driving instruction.

Why it stuck No Eleanor Roosevelt source. The line traces to Mary Schmich's 1997 Chicago Tribune column.

Why it stuck The modern quote flattens a two-sentence conditional into a standalone imperative. The "not all of us can do great things" is what makes the second sentence land.

She repeated the two-sentence form many times in letters. The one-sentence version is the Instagram form.

Why it stuck The real line is a 23-word monologue. Memory compresses it to the punchiest six words — and flips the pronoun from "I" to "you."

Why it stuck Yoda's line is four words long. Quoters tend to pad it — "there is no such thing as trying" and so on.

Why it stuck Kipling's poem argues the opposite — that the divide dissolves between equals. The famous opening line is quoted without the reversal that follows it.

Why it stuck Two separate biblical passages get welded together. The Ecclesiastes line is a mild endorsement of pleasure; the Isaiah line is a condemnation of reckless fatalism.

Why it stuck The two phrases both appear in the stories — just not as one line. Stage adaptations fused them; the fused form became the icon.

The combined line first appears in the 1929 film "The Return of Sherlock Holmes."

Why it stuck The line was first used by Logan to stop a riot when teenage fans tried to follow Elvis offstage at a country-music venue. It later became an announcer's sign-off at Elvis's own shows.

Why it stuck There is no contemporary record of Galileo saying this. Baretti wrote it a century and a quarter after Galileo's death. A 17th-century painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo shows the phrase on a dungeon wall, but the painting's authentication is contested.

Even if Galileo had muttered it, his inquisitors would have noted it. They did not.

Why it stuck Shakespeare's Latin line became the "real" quote. Suetonius reported Caesar may have said the Greek "καὶ σύ, τέκνον" — "you too, child" — or nothing at all.

The Latin "Et tu, Brute?" is purely Shakespeare's.

Why it stuck Told by Vitruvius two centuries after Archimedes; no surviving writing by Archimedes mentions a bath.

Why it stuck Milton's couplet is longer. The proverbial one-liner is a 19th-century compression of the image.

Why it stuck Exhaustive searches of the Einstein Archives and his collected papers have found no trace. The sentiment is distinctly American educational-reform rhetoric from the early 2000s, not early-20th-century German physics prose.

The Einstein Archives at Hebrew University have published a standing disavowal of this one.

Why it stuck The French insists on knowing how to wait — a skill, not a passive state. The English translation omits the skill clause, turning wisdom into fortune-cookie fatalism.

Why it stuck Einstein never said the short version. His actual formulation runs three dozen words. The compressed aphorism first appears in Composer magazine in 1962 (attributed to Roger Sessions paraphrasing Einstein).

Reader's Digest printed the short version in 1977, sealing the misattribution.

Why it stuck Jesus is specific about the size of the faith (a mustard seed) and the act (commanding, not moving). "Faith moves mountains" flattens both the quantity and the grammar.

Paul echoes the image in 1 Corinthians 13:2 ("though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains…"), which further conflated the forms.

Why it stuck Latin: "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." The speaker is Laocoön, warning Trojans about the wooden horse.

Why it stuck Niemöller always began with "Communists" in his 1946 versions. The ordering was politically deliberate — he was confessing his own Protestant church's complicity with the Nazi persecution of the left. Later popular versions reshuffle.

Niemöller delivered dozens of variants himself across 1946–1976; the "Jews first" variant is post-hoc and softens his confession.

Why it stuck No Gandhi text contains the quote. The structure closely matches Klein's 1918 speech to clothing workers, which predates Gandhi's public fame outside India.

The misattribution to Gandhi appears to begin in the 1980s.

Why it stuck The oath counsels avoiding harm in different wording. "First, do no harm" — primum non nocere — is Latin, not Greek, and appears as a stand-alone maxim only in the 19th century.

Why it stuck The Hippocratic Oath does not contain "first, do no harm." Hippocrates said something similar in Epidemics ("Practice two things … help, or at least do no harm"), but the Latin aphorism is 17th-century medical tradition.

Modern medical oaths (Geneva Declaration, 1948) do not contain the phrase either. It is doctors' folklore, not formal scripture.

Why it stuck Translations drift between "bold," "brave," and "strong." Virgil's Latin is more military than motivational — Turnus is rallying a charge, not giving a TED talk.

Why it stuck The opening clause stands alone so often it's become a schoolhouse fragment. The sentence runs another 30 words. Lincoln's math ("four score and seven" = 87 years before 1863 = 1776) is the whole conceit.

Five manuscript copies of the speech survive in Lincoln's hand, each slightly different. The Bliss copy is the version on the Lincoln Memorial.

Why it stuck Not a misquote by words — but Rhett says it flat and slow. Parodies and impressions give it emphasis on "damn"; the film plays it casually, almost muttered.

Included because inflection is as often misremembered as vocabulary.

Why it stuck Correct as written. Listed because the book version (Margaret Mitchell, 1936) is "My dear, I don't give a damn." The film added "Frankly," which became canonical.

Why it stuck The isolated phrase is a critic's verdict. In Shakespeare it's Macbeth despairing about life itself. The missing "told by an idiot" changes it from dismissive to cosmic.

Faulkner used the middle three words as the title of The Sound and the Fury (1929), preserving the weight of the original.

Why it stuck Edison gave the line with different ratios in different interviews — two/ninety-eight in the earliest, then shifted to one/ninety-nine. Both are authentic; only one is famous.

Why it stuck The line is genuine; it gets misquoted in proportion (10/90, 5/95) and sometimes credited to Einstein.

Why it stuck Shakespeare's line is a list of pointless embellishments. Popular usage welds two items of the list together — gilding belongs to gold, painting to the lily.

Why it stuck Pappus of Alexandria, 4th century. The "move the world" phrasing tightens Pappus's longer clause.

Why it stuck The "liberty or death" climax is the recorded fragment. The full speech was reconstructed 42 years later by William Wirt from oyster-house recollections. Whether Henry said the exact words is uncertain.

Wirt's reconstruction became the canonical version. Historians accept the sentiment but not every word.

Why it stuck No stenographer was present. The wording is William Wirt's 1817 reconstruction in his Henry biography.

Why it stuck First printed in an 1851 Soule editorial. Greeley reprinted it and is now universally credited.

Why it stuck Einstein's 1926 letter says "He does not throw dice." "With the universe" is a later gloss.

Why it stuck The sentiment is not in the Bible. Franklin reworked a line from Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government (1698), itself an English version of Aesop and Euripides.

A 2000 Barna survey found 75% of Americans believed the phrase was biblical. It is not.

Why it stuck The line was popularised by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack (1736). Surveys still find three-quarters of Americans believe it's scripture; it isn't.

Why it stuck Nietzsche's three-sentence passage is inseparable — the second and third clauses turn the line from assertion into accusation and grief. The bumper-sticker version is celebration or nihilism, depending on who is quoting it.

The passage is spoken by a lantern-carrying madman, not the author.

Why it stuck The phrase is pinned to Mies in architecture circles, Flaubert in literary ones, Warburg in art history. The Yale Book of Quotations marks it unverifiable for all three.

The inverted form — "the devil is in the details" — is a 20th-century flip; see our phrases shelf entry.

Why it stuck Plural "ways" and a dropped subordinate clause. Cowper's hymn is specific about the purpose — the mystery exists so that wonders can be performed.