Customer Reviews

They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions

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It may well be true, as Roy Howard never said (p. 51) that "too much fact checking has ruined many a good news story." But the many misquotations listed here, some very well known, often have fascinating stories in themselves. In a day when, thanks to the Internet, misquotations, urban legends, and dubious "facts" fly faster and farther than ever, this book is a very valuable resource to have around.

My major complaint with this book is that I wish it had been much longer -- for example, there are numerous quotes attributed to Winston Churchill (like the one about being a liberal when you're 25) that could stand to be debunked alongside the two included in this volume.

Still, though, it's very helpful to be able to demonstrate to folks that Lenin never said anything about "useful idiots" (p. 76), that Lincoln never made the long statement beginning, "You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift..." (p. 82), or that Voltaire never "defend[ed] to the death your right to say it" (p. 124). For those reasons alone, I would recommend this book be kept and studied by anyone who cares about truth, accuracy, and stomping urban legends to the death they deserve.

He's my professor in college at UCO, and he's an amazing man.

This work is just an extenstion of his personality -- exacting, intelligent, and focused on what's really true rather than just what people say.

If you're at all interested in accuracy, or if you're a big fan of quotations (like I am), than this is a wonderful book for you!

THEY NEVER SAID IT is a collection of "fake quotes, misquotes and misleading atributions" compiled by Paul F. Boller Jr and John George. The authors were troubled by references to prestigious dead men to score political points without caring about the veracity of the quotation:

"Using quotations is a time-honored practice. There have always been people who liked to liven up what they were saying with appropriate statements from the writings of others. Today, however, quotations tend to be polemical rather than decorative. People use them to prove points rather than to provide pleasure. Quotemen (and quotewomen) do not simply quote; they quote in order to score points, usually of a political nature, and thereby throw their opponents off balance. Sometimes they merely quote a highly esteemed authority -- Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson -- in order to bolster their own position."

One finds many quotations that have become set phrases in English, such as Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake,", Jimmy Cagney's "You Dirty Rat", and Galileo's "Eppur si muove". Others were part of McCarthy-era polemics about Communist intrigue.

As this is not meant to be an exhaustive compendium of spurious quotations, but rather somewhat light entertainment, the datedness of the work makes it less enjoyable than it might have been upon its 1990 publication. So many of the quotes date from postwar anti-Semites or John Birch Society figures, but these groups' rhetoric is increasingly forgotten. Samuel Goldwyn gets a long list of quotations that no one remembers any more, but Yogi Berra's similar sayings are not mentioned at all. For the book to be truly commendable, these quotations would have to not only be apocryphal, but persist in contemporary society. Still, there are enough fake quotations here that continue to circulate that reading this book can still be a profitable experience, but I can't recommend buying it.

Popular culture is packed with events and quotations that everyone is familiar with-- but which are fictional. This book is a collection of quotations that weren't actually said by the people they are attributed to.

The book is interesting, mostly because of the way that the authors tell the stories of how the quotations came to be accepted as real. Sometimes, the reasons are as simple as misunderstandings, poor transcriptions of speeches, and the like. Sometimes, the reasons are less innocent.

A significant number of the false quotations in this book are simply inventions of people with political or religious axes to grind. For example, Lenin never said that "The first step in overthrowing a government is to establish a firearms registration law," even though many gun rights organizations regularly use that quotation to "prove" that gun control is a commie plot. Similarly, Darwin didn't make his often-quoted deathbed retraction of the Theory of Evolution; rather, a variety of religious conservatives have put those words into his mouth, in an effort to somehow "prove" that the theory is false.

It's valuable to have these spurious quotations corrected. Today, in part due to the Internet, misinformation can spread literally at the speed of light. The only way to combat this misinformation is with the truth, and this book is an important source for that truth.

This is a valuable, entertaining book, and I recommend it highly.

I bought it because I've noticed the number of questionable or misattributed literary quotes popping up constantly on the Internet. I thought this book would contain not just a list of quotes, but would be arranged as a narrative about misattribution. Instead it was laid out like a reference book, with a list of misattributed quotes by their supposed authors.

Also, while it contained a good number of quotes from political figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, it contained fewer literary quotes than I'd hoped. Perhaps these misquotes (such as the supposed quote by Charles Dickens "There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate") have only proliferated since the advent of the Internet? I'd be curious to read more on that topic, but this book (published in 1989) is obviously not the place.

I enjoyed this book much less than I expected.About half way through I began looking forward to the end.When I finished the book I tried to think why I felt this way.I came up with a couple of things that may be the reason.First,this book was put together by two professors who may well know the facts;but that doesn't mean they can use the facts to make a good,entertaining or inspiring book.Upon finishing this book,a reader should thirst for more.My feeling was; enough is enough.Secondly,there seemed to be no overall direction but rather collecting up examples in very selected areas.Thirdly,the authors seemed to have an agenda to dispute statements attributed to liberal/socialist individuals by right wingers, but not the other way around.Being a good writer,like being a good teacher, means that one should inspire the reader or student to want to read or learn more.This book just didn't do it for me.