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Gideon Rachman has a nice post on apocryphal phrases:
I was amused to read this column by one of President Carter’s former speech-writers,
pointing out that Carter never used the word “malaise” in the famous
speech in 1979 that became known as the “malaise speech”. A shame since
both the speech and the phrase have come to define the Carter era as
one of gloom and defeatism.The anecdote supports a personal theory of mine that a great many
era-defining sayings are apocryphal. James Callaghan, Britain’s prime
minister in the late 1970s, was lambasted for saying “Crisis, what
crisis” when he returned from an overseas trip to a strike-torn
Britain. Except he never said it. It was a newspaper headline
purporting to summarise his comments.Margaret Thatcher’s most famous saying is “There is no alternative”.
And yet I am assured by better-informed colleagues that she never
actually said that.
The ancient wisdom and long-term view of the Chinese is often meant
to be epitomised by Chou Enlai’s famous comment that it was “too soon
to tell” what the impact of the French revolution had been. But I
challenge readers to find an uncontested source for this remark. I’ve
seen it variously claimed that he said it in the 1970s to Henry
Kissinger and in the 1940s to a British diplomat.
As for Marx’s - “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to
lose but your chains.” He never wrote that. It was an improvement and
simplification of a rather more convoluted sentence from the Communist
Manifesto.
Any other examples?