Political misquotes: The 10 most famous things never actually said

8/6/2019 Political misquotes: The 10 most famous things never actually said

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Political misquotes: The 10 most famousthings never actually said

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty!" Ilsa Laszlow never said, "Play it again,

Sam," and Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my Dear Watson."

But there these misquotes are, firmly lodged in the public consciousness, even though

they appear nowhere in the original works.

The same is true for things "said" that is, widely believed to be said but not actually

said by political figures. Sometimes a misquote is cooked up by opponents or

parodists as a way of discrediting or mocking the figure. Sometimes a line is

attributed to a widely admired person as a way of making it sound more

authoritative, like when someone co-signs a loan. And sometimes it's just a mistake.

Here are 10 of the most widely believed but completely bogus things ever "said"

by political figures.

- Eoin O'Carroll, CSMonitor.com

10. "I can see Russia from myhouse!"

Sarah Palin

It was actually comedian Tina Fey, who

was impersonating Ms. Palin on SaturdayNight Live who uttered this line that isnow widely attributed to the formerAlaska governor.

The basis for this line comes from aSeptember 2008 interview with ABC News's Charles Gibson, who asked Palin whatinsights she had from her state being so close to Russia. She responded: "They'reour next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here inAlaska, from an island in Alaska."

This is true. As Slate has pointed out, on a clear day, those on the Alaskan islandof Little Diomede can see the Russian island of Big Diomede, located across the
http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/


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International Date Line some two and a half miles away. Given that Big Diomedehas no permanent population, the amount of foreign policy experience one cangain from staring at it is debatable. But you can see Russian soil while standing inAlaska.

9. "I invented the Internet." Al Gore

Everybody knows that Al Gore claimed tohave invented the Internet. But like manythings that everyone knows, it's notactually true.

So where did it come from? In a March 9,

1999 interview on CNN, Wolf Blitzer askedthe candidate to describe what

distinguished him from his Democratic challenger, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley.Here is how the exchange went:

Blitzer: "Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process,support you instead of Bill Bradley?"

Gore: I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will becomprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to drawpeople toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the

American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last sixyears. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative increating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range ofinitiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth andenvironmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

It's clumsy wording, to be sure. But it's clear from looking at Gore's wholestatement that he never claimed to have invented the Internet, in the sense of

writing code or laying fiber-optic cables. He meant only to take credit for thecontributions that he made as a member of Congress, contributions that have beenlauded by people like Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, who wrote the code that servesas the foundation for the Internet.

Who is to blame for coming up with the "Al Gore claimed to have invented theInternet" meme?This guy.

Two days after Gore appeared on CNN, libertarian writer Declan McCullagh posteda story on Wired News mocking him for claiming to be the "father of the Internet."McCullagh never used the word "invented," but it took only a few days before itmutated into its current form, helping to cement the public perception of Gore as aserial exaggerator.
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8. "First they ignore you.Then they laugh at you. Thenthey attack you. Then you

win."- Mohandas Gandhi

This line is probably the best summary ofGandhi's philosophy of satyagraha as youcan get in 16 words. But there's noevidence that the Great Soul ever saidthis.

We don't know where this quote camefrom, but it is strikingly similar to

something that the trade unionistNicholas Klein gave in a 1914 address tothe Amalgamated Clothing Workers ofAmerica in Baltimore:

"First they ignore you. Then they ridiculeyou. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they buildmonuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the AmalgamatedClothing Workers of America."

7. "Let them eat cake."- Marie Antoinette

The wife of Louis XVI may have been outof touch, but she probably never said this.

The first recorded instance of thisanecdote appears in "The Confessions of

Jean Jacques Rousseau," in which therepublican philosopher writes, "I

recollected the thoughtless saying of agreat princess, who, on being informedthat the country people had no bread,replied, 'Then let them eat pastry!'"

Rousseau's "Confessions" was completedin 1769, when Antoinette was 14 yearsold and still living in Austria.
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6. "Et tu, Brute?"- Julius Caesar

Nobody knows exactly what Julius

Caesar's last words were. In "The Lives ofTwelve Caesars," written 165 years afterthe assassination, the historian GaiusSuetonius Tranquillus writes:

When [Caesar] saw that he was beset onevery side by drawn daggers, he muffled

his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to his feet with hisleft hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his body alsocovered.

But Seutonius also notes that "some have written" that when Caesar saw his close

friend Marcus Brutus rushing at him, he said in Greek, "Kai su, teknon," a phrasethat is notoriously difficult to translate but is often rendered "You too, my child?"

Some historians have taken this phrase not as one of shock at Brutus' betrayal,but as a threat to the conspirator, as in "Your turn next, kid."

By the time Shakespeare famously deployed "Et tu, Brute?" (in the 1599 playbearing the Roman emperor's name), the phrase was alreadywell known to Englishaudiences, having appeared in a 1582 Latin play on the same subject performed atOxford.

5. "I was recently on a tour ofLatin America, and the onlyregret I have was that I didn'tstudy Latin harder in schoolso I could converse with thosepeople."

Dan QuayleDan Quayle has certainly uttered his share of malapropisms, solecisms, andstraight-up absurdities, but he didn't say this one. According to the indispensableurban-legend-debunking website Snopes.com, the quote originated in 1989 withRepresentative Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, a Republican.

Speaking to a group of fellow Republicans, she recounted that the she and Quaylehad attended an event at the Belgian embassy, where vice president Quaylecomplimented Schneider on her command of French (this was back when speakingFrench wasn't regarded as a political liability).

Schneider then attributed to Quayle the belief that Latin was the lingua franca of
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Latin America, before concluding that the whole story was a joke. But manypublications, including Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Time,reported Schneider's joke as fact, further cementing in the public consciousnessthe perception of the vice president as an intellectual lightweight.

4. "The death of one man is atragedy. The death of millionsis a statistic."

Josef Stalin

There's no proof that Stalin ever said this,but even if he did, he would likely havebeen quoting a 1932 essay on Frenchhumor by the German journalist, satirist,and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky.

Much like Rousseau did with his "greatprincess," Tucholsky quotes a fictionaldiplomat from the French Ministry ofForeign affairs, speaking on the horrors of

war.

"The war?" says Tucholsky's diplomat, "Icannot find it to be so bad! The death of

one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundredsof thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!"

3. "The ends justify the means." Niccol Machiavelli

Probably the closest Machiavelli gets toexpressing this view is in [Chapter XVIII of "ThePrince":

[M]en judge generally more by the eye than bythe hand, because it belongs to everybody to see

you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know

what you are, and those few dare not opposethemselves to the opinion of the many, whohave the majesty of the state to defend them;and in the actions of all men, and especially of

princes, which it is not prudent to challenge,one judges by the result.
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For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state,the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybodybecause the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by whatcomes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a placethere only when the many have no ground to rest on.

Needless to say, this is considerably more nuanced than the stick-figureconsequentialism commonly attributed to the Florentine political theorist.

What's more, it's not clear that Machiavelli is being completely serious here.Philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau long maintained that "The Prince"

was a work of satire that sought to expose the cynicism of one-man rule. Thisdoesn't sound that far-fetched when you consider that Machiavelli was arrestedand tortured by agents of the Medici family, whose members he dedicated "ThePrince" to. And there's no denying that Machiavelli had an impish streak; duringhis later years, he wrote several popular and politically stinging satiricalcomedies for the stage.

2. "To get rich is glorious." Deng Xiaoping

Western journalists in search of ashorthand for China's dramatic economicturnaround will almost invariably trot this

one out. But, oddly enough, it doesn'tshow up much in Chinese publications,and nobody has managed to find theoriginal source where Deng allegedly saidit.

The phrase was popularized by the writerOrville Schell in his 1984 book "To GetRich Is Glorious: China in the '80s." ButSchell never actually attributed the wordsto Deng, telling the L.A. Times's Evelyn

Iritani in 2004 that it merely "grew out of the zeitgeist" of China's economic

reforms.

That said, it's almost impossible to verify or debunk any quotation attributed to adead Chinese leader, as China's Communist Party is extraordinarily adept atrevising history so that it meets the political needs of the present.
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1. "I am a jelly doughnut!" John F. Kennedy

According to the near-ubiquitous urban

legend, when Kennedy stood in front ofthe Rathaus Schneberg on June 26,1963, to express his solidarity with thepeople of West Berlin, he should havesaid "Ich bin Berliner," not "Ich bin einBerliner." By including the indefinitearticle "ein," he likened himself to a

Berliner Pfannkuchen, a type of jam-filled pastry. Somehow this blunder wasmissed by Robert Lochner, Kennedy's Berlin-raised translator who provided him

with the phrase, as well as by the half-million native German speakers whocheered wildly upon hearing it.

This story is bogus for three reasons:

Grammar: As University of Wisconsin, Madison, linguist Jrgen Eichhoff noted in1993, if Kennedy had said, "Ich bin Berliner," he would have been stating that he

was literally from Berlin. The "ein" is gramatically necessary to make it clear thatone is speaking in the figurative sense.

Regional cuisine: In other parts of the country, "Berliner Pfannkuchen," is indeedshortened to just "Berliner," but in Berlin, they just call it a "Pfannkuchen," in thesame way that a Philadelphian would just say "cheese steak."

Context: Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Le Monde ran an editorial headlined"Nous sommes tous Amricains," and nobody took the headline to read "We are allsteak tartare." Because that would have been really dumb.

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Political misquotes: The 10 most famous things never actually said

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