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

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.

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.

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!