8 Famous Last Words That Made History

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” It’s the line every American schoolkid learns, spoken on a British gallows in New York — on September 22, exactly 250 years ago this week — by a 21-year-old captain about to be hanged as a spy.

Here’s the trouble: no one wrote it down at the time. The earliest solid account, a British officer’s diary, records only that Hale met his death with great composure. The famous sentence surfaced years later, and scholars think it was polished up from a popular play of the era, Joseph Addison’s Cato. So Hale was real and his courage was real. The perfect quote is very likely something we wrote for him afterward.

“Et tu, Brute?” — you and me both, we can hear it. And it’s a wonderful line. It’s also Shakespeare’s, written more than sixteen centuries after the knives came out.

The ancient historians tell a bleaker story. Plutarch says Caesar simply pulled his toga over his head when he saw Brutus among the attackers and said nothing at all. Suetonius reports the same silence, while passing along a rumor — which he clearly doesn’t believe — that Caesar gasped something in Greek, kai su, teknon, “you too, child.” No triumphant Latin, no theater. Probably just a man dying under a pile of his friends.

“Pardon me, sir. I did not mean to do it.” Climbing the scaffold steps, the former queen of France trod on the executioner’s foot, and apologized. Then they killed her.

This one you can more or less trust. It comes down through the account of the executioner’s family, and it fits everything else about her final hours — the composure, the reflexive good manners drilled into her since childhood at the Austrian court. Of all the lines on this list, it’s the least grand and the most human, which is probably why it rings true.

You’ll see two competing lines. One is theatrical: “Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.” The other, gentler: “I shall hear in heaven.” Modern scholars have quietly retired both — the first was reported by an assistant with a habit of embellishing, and the second has no reliable source behind it.

What we do have is an eyewitness, his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, and it’s stranger than any quote. As Beethoven lay unconscious, a thunderstorm broke over the city. At a great clap of thunder the dying man suddenly opened his eyes, raised his right arm toward the ceiling, held it there for a moment — then fell back, gone. No words. Just that.

“This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.” It’s so perfectly Wilde — witty to the last breath, broke in a shabby rented room — that we badly want it to be true.

It almost is, and that’s the catch. According to his biographer, Wilde really did make a crack about the dreadful wallpaper “fighting a duel to the death” with him. But he said it to a visitor weeks before he died, not on his deathbed. As a last word it’s apocryphal. As a Wilde line it’s real — the timing just got improved in the retelling, which he might have appreciated.

As the story goes, a priest at his bedside urged the great skeptic to renounce Satan, and Voltaire replied, “This is no time to be making new enemies.” A perfect last laugh from a man who spent his life needling the Church.

Too perfect. The joke doesn’t appear until well after his death, and versions of it have been pinned on several other people over the years before settling on Voltaire. He was credited with something like seven different sets of “final words,” which is usually a sign that we’ve stopped recording a death and started writing a legend.

The legend says Leonardo died apologizing — telling those around him he had “offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” The eternal perfectionist, unsatisfied even at the end.

It’s a lovely idea with almost nothing under it. The story traces to Giorgio Vasari, writing decades later and not in the room, and the famous scene — Leonardo dying in the arms of the French king — is one historians call flatly impossible, since the king was elsewhere at the time. Take it as a story people told about genius and doubt, not as anything Leonardo actually said.

“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” After all the disputed and invented lines on this list, here’s one we can actually stand behind — and it isn’t clever at all.

His sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, described his final moments in a eulogy she later read aloud. He looked a long time at his children, then at his wife, then past all of them at something none of them could see — and said it three times before he went. It’s the most modern death here and, oddly, the most trustworthy: no gallows, no thunderstorm, just a person, watched by the people who loved him, still capable of wonder.