Don't Quote me on that... Things they never really said thread

“Let Them Eat Cake”



Let’s say you’re a history teacher, and you need to somehow show your students that the French hierarchy hated the peasant class. Why, you pull out this quote! What better way to show how callous Marie Antoinette was about her own starving people.

The story goes that she uttered this when she was informed that the rebellion had invaded the Bastille, and that it could no longer be ignored. The thing is, she never actually said that. It came from a book by Rousseau written when Queen Marie was about seven years old.

“Elementary, My Dear Watson!”



More than anything, Holmes is remembered for his ability to deduce things out of thin air. “Elementary, my dear Watson” is his best quote embodying that.

However, if you scan the books or even ctrl-f their PDFs, you won’t find one mention of the line. That’s because it was never written in the books and seems to have gained widespread popularity from the 1929 movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Everyone just seems to have forgotten where it came from.

In 1999 Noel Edmonds was so upset that the BBC cancelled Noel's House Party that he did a big shit in the Blue Peter pond.

"OUR DEEPEST FEAR IS NOT THAT WE ARE INADEQUATE. OUR DEEPEST FEAR IS THAT WE ARE POWERFUL BEYOND MEASURE."

THis quote is attributed to Nelson Mandela but is in fact a passage from self-help guru Marianne Williamson's 1992 book.

“Love means loving the unlovable – or it is no virtue at all.”

A well known G.K. Chesterton quote that he never actually said

"OUR DEEPEST FEAR IS NOT THAT WE ARE INADEQUATE. OUR DEEPEST FEAR IS THAT WE ARE POWERFUL BEYOND MEASURE."

Nelson Mandela quote that he never said

He-Man has just told this dwarf he can touch his magic sword but only if he keeps his eyes closed.