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| Hearsay: |
Many famous quotes are actually misquotes. Now the people who brought you the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are bring you a debunking of popular mis- and altered quotations.
Some of history’s most famous one-liners are about to be exposed as inventions by other writers with plenty of time to hone their prose. Hundreds of pithy remarks from “Let them eat cake” to “Elementary, my dear Watson”, turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring – or which were never said by those thought to have coined them.
The list includes many supposedly historical lines, such as Napoleon’s “Not tonight Josephine”, but also covers modern icons including Star Trek. No one ever said “Beam me up Scotty”, and Mr Spock never said “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.”
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October 25th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Years ago, I was asked to verify a remark attributed to Emma Goldman, the Russian-born American anarchist. The remark was, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
I never found that line, but I did find the following story in Red Emma’s memoirs:
“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
“I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.”
Living My Life, Vol. I (1931).
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” is probably apocryphal. I’m certain that many other famous remarks are misquotations too.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Play it again, Sam.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Incidentally, the task of verifying quotations taught me that quotationaries are unreliable. Many quotationaries do not cite (in body text, footnotes or bibliographies) the source documents. The only place to verify the accuracy of a quotation is the source document—if you can find it.