Fifteen of the most-shared quotes on the internet, and what the record actually shows about who said them.
A quotation travels further with a famous name on it, and nothing along the way checks whether the name belongs there. So unsourced lines drift toward the same handful of magnets. Einstein, Twain, Gandhi, Churchill, Wilde. And stay there. Then someone sets it in nice type over a sunset and it becomes permanent.
We have been collecting and verifying quotes since 2007, and the wording and attribution of every quote in our library is checked before it goes in. Below are the ones we get asked about most. Each links into the free quote maker with the accurate wording already loaded.
A note on method. Attribution is a matter of evidence, not certainty. Where we say a line has no source, we mean no source has been found in the published record, including that person's own collected writings where those exist. New evidence turns up, and scholars disagree. If you have a source for something listed here, tell us and we will correct it.
Usually credited to Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi never wrote this exact sentence. It is a 20th-century condensation of a longer passage of his. What he did write, in 1913, is: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
Usually credited to Albert Einstein
No Einstein source has ever been produced. The line surfaces in 12-step recovery literature around 1981 and in Rita Mae Brown’s novel Sudden Death in 1983. Decades after Einstein’s death.
Usually credited to Albert Einstein
There is no record of Einstein saying or writing this, and no version of it can be traced to his lifetime. It appears to be a late-20th-century composition.
Usually credited to Marilyn Monroe or Eleanor Roosevelt
This is historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing in a 1976 scholarly article about Puritan funeral sermons. She later wrote a whole book about how the line escaped her.
Usually credited to Hippocrates
The sentence does not appear anywhere in the Hippocratic corpus. It is a modern paraphrase that hardened into a quotation.
Usually credited to Mahatma Gandhi
Attributed to Gandhi for decades, with no source in his collected writings. Which run to roughly 100 volumes and are searchable.
Usually credited to Confucius
Not Confucius. There is no Chinese source, and the saying appears in 20th-century American advice writing long before it was given a classical author.
Usually credited to an African proverb
Universally labelled an African proverb, but no source language, region, or earlier text has ever been identified for it. It first appears in English, in print, in the 2000s.
Usually credited to Mark Twain
Nothing resembling this appears in Twain’s published work, letters, or notebooks. The attribution seems to begin in the 2000s.
Usually credited to Oscar Wilde
No source in Wilde’s writings, letters, or recorded conversation. It first appears in print long after his death.
Usually credited to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill
Older than both men. A close version appears in Jonathan Swift in 1710: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
Usually credited to Voltaire
Written by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906 as a summary of Voltaire’s attitude. She later confirmed in writing that the phrasing was her own.
Usually credited to Edmund Burke
No such sentence exists anywhere in Burke’s works. The attribution has been publicly challenged since at least the 1950s and has never been substantiated.
Usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt
It circulated anonymously well before it was pinned on Roosevelt, and appears in no speech or column of hers.
Usually credited to J.R.R. Tolkien. Misquoted
The attribution is right but the wording is wrong, and the error reverses the meaning. Tolkien wrote: “Not all those who wander are lost.”
No. There is no Einstein source for it. The earliest known appearances are in 12-step recovery literature around 1981 and in Rita Mae Brown's 1983 novel Sudden Death.
Not in those words. It is a condensation of a longer 1913 passage. What he actually wrote was: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
A quotation travels further with a famous name attached, and nothing on the way checks it. Einstein, Twain, Gandhi, Churchill, Lincoln and Wilde act as magnets. Unsourced lines drift toward them over time. AI-generated quote content is accelerating this.
We have been collecting and checking quotes since 2007, and every quote in the library is checked for accurate wording and attribution before it goes in. Quotes we cannot source, we do not publish.
Yes. Every quote on this page links straight into the free quote maker with the accurate wording already loaded. No sign-up, no watermark.