The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and WhenOur language is full of hundreds of quotations that are often cited but seldom confirmed. Ralph Keyes's The Quote Verifier considers not only classic misquotes such as "Nice guys finish last," and "Play it again, Sam," but more surprising ones such as "Ain't I a woman?" and "Golf is a good walk spoiled," as well as the origins of popular sayings such as "The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings," "No one washes a rented car," and "Make my day." |
From inside the book
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... later learned he hadn't said. Like many, I thought that Faulkner said the past is never dead in Mississippi, it's not even past, even though the author didn't limit this observation to his home state. When it comes to quotations, memory ...
... later made the same observation. Since Wanamaker founded his first department store in 1861, when Lever was ten, this seems unlikely. Fortune magazine thought Wanamaker expressed the famous adage in 1885, but it gave no context. While ...
... later, in 1893, a British parliamentarian named St. John Broderick told a Leeds audience, “The first duty of a citizen is to consider what he can do for the state and not what the state will do for him.” A decade after that, in 1904 ...
... later reported seeing a version of this saying on an old English sporting print. Among various related proverbs recorded in medieval England was “Who climbeth highest most dreadful is his fall.” In the fourth century a.d. the Latin poet ...
... later, in 1938, the Times ran this unsigned observation about the federal budget: “It's a billion here and a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money.” (The Los Angeles Times reprinted that item a few days later ...
Contents
1 | |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 259 |
SOURCE NOTES | 267 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 345 |
KEY WORD INDEX | 347 |
NAME INDEX | 375 |
SIDEBAR INDEX | 389 |