They never said that.

Why it stuck Niebuhr's 1943 sermon uses "courage" first, then "serenity." The AA liturgy reorders them, and the "God grant me" opener is a smoothed simplification of Niebuhr's "Father, give us."

Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, documented the authorship in The Serenity Prayer (2003).

Why it stuck There is no documented instance of Picasso saying this. Eliot's earlier line — much more careful, distinguishing imitation from absorption — drifts into Picasso's mouth around the 1980s.

Steve Jobs popularised the Picasso version in a 1996 PBS interview.

Why it stuck Frost's narrator calls the saying his neighbour's "father's saying" and repeats it "in the darkness of old" — the poem is critiquing it. The aphorism survives the critique intact.

Why it stuck The triad is a fragment of Lincoln's conditional clause. The phrase likely echoes Theodore Parker's 1850 sermons.

Why it stuck The earliest English form uses "wits jump" (agree). "Great minds think alike" appears two centuries later. The longer "…though fools seldom differ" is modern joke-extension.

Why it stuck The three-word form is used as a slogan; the real line is a hedged argument with qualifiers. Stripping them inverts the rhetorical stance.

Why it stuck The movie hangs an entire speech on the caveat "for lack of a better word." The three-word version became the rallying cry it warned against.

Oliver Stone has said for decades he meant the speech as indictment, not endorsement. The truncation erased the irony.

Why it stuck Gandhi's Autobiography (1929) uses a near-identical phrase and credits "a maxim" — he did not claim it as his own. The Augustinian original predates Gandhi by fifteen centuries.

Why it stuck Correct as the final line. But it is often quoted as "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" — and people move the "had won" from two sentences earlier. Orwell built the last paragraph deliberately; recombination changes the rhythm.

The ending is one of the bleakest in modern fiction — the five words land because of what precedes them, not on their own.

Why it stuck Nietzsche pairs the line with one about the abyss. Quoters take the monster half and leave the abyss.

Why it stuck "Uneasy lies" is Elizabethan phrasing that modern ears reorder into a heavier, more straightforward sentence. The meaning drifts from insomnia to physical burden.

Why it stuck The real couplet is a parallelism across two lines. Quoting the second half alone drops the heaven/hell symmetry that made the line memorable in the first place.

Why it stuck The line is typically quoted correctly but misattributed — sometimes to Melville, sometimes to Conrad. It is Shakespeare's Ferdinand, surveying the shipwreck.

Why it stuck Sartre later said the line is about people whose judgement has curdled our self-image — not blanket misanthropy.

Why it stuck "Hello" sounds more intimate and creepy than "Good evening." Parodies latched onto the shorter form and it replaced the real one in memory.

Why it stuck Luther's "here I stand" is the conclusion of a longer declaration about conscience. The line is a period, not the whole sentence.

Recent scholarship suggests the "here I stand" sentence may itself have been added by Luther's publisher to the printed version. The conscience passage is firmly in the record.

Why it stuck Twain scholars have hunted this for decades. It does not appear in his letters, his notebooks, or his fiction. The attribution first shows up in 1970s American political journalism.

Some scholars point to a 1971 book by John Robert Colombo citing the line without source. Twain was already dead 60 years by then.

Why it stuck Often attributed to Churchill with no source. Walter Benjamin and Hermann Göring have also been credited.

Why it stuck Churchill did make quips about being his own historian. But the pithy "History is written by the victors" predates him — variations appear in Hermann Göring's Nuremberg testimony (1946) and in French proverbial form from the 19th century.

Churchill's The Second World War (1948–53) is a case of him living up to his joke.

Why it stuck Shakespeare wrote "hoist" (past participle of "to hoise") and "petar" (a small bomb). Modern "hoisted by" and "petard" are spelling updates — but "on his own" is a preposition error that changes the meaning from "by" (agent) to "on" (location).

"Petar" was a 16th-century siege device. It often killed its own engineer — which is the whole joke.

Why it stuck Dickinson's manuscripts use quotation marks around "Hope" — she is pointing to the word itself as the thing with feathers. The paraphrase strips the meta-reference.

Her em-dashes and capitalisations were largely "corrected" in the 1890 Todd–Higginson edition. The quotes around "Hope" were kept.

Why it stuck The film Apollo 13 (1995) shifts the tense to present — more dramatic. The real transmission was past tense because the failure had already happened.

Why it stuck The real transmission used past tense. Apollo 13 (the 1995 film) rewrote it to present tense for urgency, and the film's version is now what everyone remembers.

Both Swigert ("OK, Houston, we've had a problem here") and Lovell ("Houston, we've had a problem") used the past tense on the original loop.

Why it stuck The "jelly doughnut" misreading is a 1983 New York Times invention. In context Kennedy's grammar was fine.

Why it stuck The line is Sanskrit (kālo 'smi loka-kṣaya-kṛt) and scholars dispute the translation — "time" is a more literal gloss than "death." Oppenheimer's rendering became canon.

Why it stuck The three "I am"s land because of the sentence before them — the heart's old brag. Quoted alone, the repetition is just a mantra; in context, it's an observation about the body's refusal to give up.

The phrase is also misattributed to Sylvia Plath herself, rather than to her semi-autobiographical narrator.

Why it stuck The line is real, but it's a dispatch about a specific battle (Zela, Pontus). It gets transposed onto Rubicon, Gaul, or the Senate — more dramatic settings.

Why it stuck Weems added the cherry tree anecdote in the book's fifth edition, a decade after Washington's death. No contemporary record supports it.

Why it stuck The full speech has three beats; the shortened form keeps only the first. The missing "instead of a bum" carries the grief of the scene.

Why it stuck The six-word version collapses a four-part lament. Brando's full monologue is the most quoted passage in American cinema and is almost never quoted in full.

The misquote is short enough to fit on a T-shirt. The original would need a poster.

Why it stuck Hall was paraphrasing, in Voltaire's voice, her interpretation of his defence of Helvétius. Readers took the paraphrase for quotation and the attribution stuck.

Why it stuck Hall wrote it as her summary of Voltaire's attitude, not as a translation of any Voltaire text. The quotation marks in her book are indicating paraphrase, not citation.

Hall later regretted the confusion, but by then the line was a classical-liberal motto.

Why it stuck The four-word version is a meme; the full sentence is an argument that grounds the dream in the Declaration of Independence. King is weaponising the founding documents — the truncation loses the legal-philosophical framing.

The "I have a dream" section was improvised. King had been using the rhetoric for months; it was Mahalia Jackson who called out, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin."

Why it stuck The punchier modern version optimises Edison's longer reputed wording. Neither is in his published papers; the claim spreads from mid-20th-century self-help books.

Closest verifiable Edison remark: "Every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." (1877 lab notebook paraphrase.)

Why it stuck The Latin crystallisation "scio me nihil scire" is not what Plato wrote. Socrates said he lacks both knowledge and false certainty — the punch is in the double negative, not the paradox.

The "Socratic paradox" in this form is a Renaissance invention, polished for aphorism value.

Why it stuck MacArthur's actual statement was longer; "I shall return" became the headline-friendly compression and the form he himself used afterward.

Why it stuck The poem is ironic — the speaker earlier admits the two paths "had worn them really about the same." The triumphant quote strips the irony and reverses the meaning.

The title is "The Road Not Taken," not "The Road Less Travelled" — the second most common error.

Why it stuck MacArthur used "shall" — a deliberate grammatical choice for strong future intention. "Will" softens it. He kept the distinction for the rest of his life.

The U.S. Office of War Information pushed MacArthur to change it to "We shall return." He refused.

Why it stuck The "canoe" version is a 2010s feminist-poster paraphrase. Alcott's actual line, recorded by her first biographer, uses the marital metaphor directly.

Alcott's journals use both formulations interchangeably, but "liberty is a better husband" is the one with a clear citation.

Why it stuck Correct line. But Schwarzenegger has said the line in every Terminator film since, and non-fans mis-date it to one of the sequels.

Schwarzenegger reportedly wanted it changed to "I will be back" — James Cameron refused.

Why it stuck The script has "I'm gonna make him an offer." The "I'll" contraction is the common softening.

Why it stuck The original begins with "All right" and leads with the name — matching the character's theatrical rhythm. Quoted versions put the action first for snap.

Why it stuck Correct, but widely remembered as a James Cameron line (he used it accepting the Oscar). The film line and the Oscar line are not the same moment.

Cameron's ceremony version cemented the misattribution; he was quoting his own character, not coining a phrase.

Why it stuck The "jelly doughnut" reading is an urban myth. Germans understood Kennedy perfectly. Berliners do not call the pastry Berliner — they call it Pfannkuchen. The indefinite article "ein" is grammatical here because Kennedy is not literally from Berlin; it's the correct metaphorical form.

The myth seems to have started with a 1983 Len Deighton novel and spread via a 1988 New York Times op-ed.

Why it stuck Often cited as biblical; Jerome's Latin counsel to a young monk is the earliest recorded form. The "workshop" image is Chaucer's addition in The Tale of Melibee (c. 1386): "the ydel man… is the develes chaumbre."

Neither the exact English idiom nor the "workshop" noun appears in the Authorized Version of 1611.

Why it stuck Lance's profile in Nation's Business is the earliest verifiable print appearance. The phrase has been retroactively tagged as "an old Southern saying," but no pre-1977 source has surfaced.

Why it stuck The singular "he" is specific to the film; the plural "they" is universal. People quote the version they can apply to their own plans.

Why it stuck The voice speaks about one specific ghost — Ray's father. Changing "he" to "they" flips the meaning into generic business inspiration.

The misquote has become a corporate-deck cliché for "build the product and users will arrive." The film is about nothing of the kind.

Why it stuck Marshall's prayer is the earliest verifiable source: "Unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything." No Malcolm X or MLK primary text contains the line.

Why it stuck Churchill was a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35 — the chronology alone makes the quote biographically impossible. The International Churchill Society has denied it for decades.

John Adams, Bismarck, Disraeli, and Shaw have also been miscredited. The sentiment is pan-European 19th-century.