THE ARTICLE · 4 MIN
The first part of this series checked twenty-two quotations, from ancient writers to modern films. This one is mostly modern: scientists, presidents, businessmen and films, plus two lines of scripture.
Six of these fifteen lines belong to somebody else. Two are genuine. Six are real but have been trimmed, reordered or misquoted, including three well-known lines from film and fiction. And one is an origin story that has no source. Each line has its own verdict and source in the table; the sections below are about the patterns.
The name gets upgraded
The pattern from part one shows up again. A line starts somewhere less famous (a recovery-group meeting, a newspaper column, an online post, a journal article) and after years of repetition it picks up a famous name.
On this page, lines about how to think drift to Einstein, lines about courage and about women making history drift to Eleanor Roosevelt, a witty line about being yourself drifts to Oscar Wilde, and a line about innovation drifts to Henry Ford. An article on the Henry Ford museum’s website says he “has become a patron saint of the entrepreneur, a Paul Bunyan of the business world.” In two of these cases, the person who really wrote the line can still be named.
The Mary Schmich column is a clear example. Do one thing every day that scares you appeared in her Chicago Tribune column of 1 June 1997. By August 1997 the column was circulating without her name, retitled “Wear Sunscreen” and wrongly described as a graduation speech by Kurt Vonnegut. In 1999 it became the spoken-word song “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, which credited her. The line was later attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, and in 2012 Schmich wrote that she had seen no evidence Roosevelt said it.
The film lines
The three screen and fiction lines follow a different pattern: the misquote carries its own context.
No, I am your father only makes sense after Luke’s line, and the shared version puts Luke’s name where the “No” was. Play it, Sam needs the song named. Elementary and my dear Watson are both Holmes’s words in Conan Doyle, just never in the same breath. In our reading, each misquote works on its own, which makes it easier to share, and in time it is the version people remember.
The quiet edits
The scriptural and political lines were not misattributed. They were trimmed, and the trim changed them.
The love of money is the root of all evil becomes money is the root of all evil, which is a different claim. Blood, toil, tears and sweat loses the toil. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall is squeezed into one clause. In each case the missing words are the ones that made the sentence longer, and in the verse from Timothy they are the words that carried the meaning.
How to check one yourself
- If it sounds exactly like the famous person, it is worth a second look. Several lines on this page ended up with a famous name that seemed to fit.
- Look for the earliest version, and its date. A line first found in print in 2004 is hard to pin on someone who died in 1955.
- For a film or book line, check the script or the text. Many are easy to search, and they usually settle it in a minute.
- For scripture, read the whole verse. The shared version is often missing part of it.
- Check the story about the saying, too. An origin story can need a source as much as the quotation does.
Sources
- Quote Investigator: “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results”; “Everybody is a Genius…”; “Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You”; “Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken”; “My Customers Would Have Asked For a Faster Horse”; “Genius Is One Percent Inspiration, Ninety-Nine Percent Perspiration”; “Elementary, My Dear Watson”.
- The Henry Ford, “Henry Ford’s Quotations” (Benson Ford Research Center, 2013); Snopes, “No proof Henry Ford said…” (2025); Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Project Gutenberg #7213), searched.
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Why Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”, BYU Studies 59:3, quoting her 1976 American Quarterly article; Penguin Random House, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933 (American Presidency Project).
- International Churchill Society, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” (13 May 1940); Richard M. Langworth, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Origins of a Famous Phrase”, Hillsdale College Churchill Project (2018).
- Arthur Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels and five story collections (Project Gutenberg #244, #2097, #1661, #834, #2852, #108, #3289, #2350, #69700), searched.
- Casablanca (1942): AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes; Wikiquote, Casablanca; The Phrase Finder, “Play it again, Sam”; Wikipedia, Play It Again, Sam (play).
- The Empire Strikes Back (1980): ACMI, “Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back – ‘No, I am your father.’” (2020); a script copy online (IMSDb).
- 1 Timothy 6:10 and Proverbs 16:18, King James Version (Project Gutenberg #10).
- Wikipedia, “Blood is thicker than water”, for William Jenkyn’s sermon, Reinhart Fuchs and the 1990s–2000s origin claim; Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (Project Gutenberg #5999).
Checked September 2026. The verdicts on the six misattributed lines rest on Quote Investigator, The Henry Ford and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s own account; the dated speeches on the American Presidency Project and the International Churchill Society; the Holmes verdict on our search of the Gutenberg texts and Quote Investigator; the film lines on AFI, ACMI, Wikiquote, The Phrase Finder and a script copy online; the verses on the King James text; and the proverb on Wikipedia’s sourced history and Scott’s novel. If you can date any of these earlier, with a source: hacksvitae@gmail.com
Related: Did They Really Say That? Part 1 · Older Than You Think · Real or Myth? Animal mindsets and shop tricks
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