8 Famous Quotes Almost Everyone Attributes to the Wrong Person

Albert Einstein never said this. Not in a letter, not in a lecture, not in any verified writing. Researchers have searched his papers exhaustively and come up empty. The phrase first appears in print in a 1981 pamphlet from Narcotics Anonymous — hardly the output of a theoretical physicist. It spread through self-help culture and recovery circles for years before someone thought to dress it up with Einstein’s name, probably because “anonymous recovery pamphlet says” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

The irony, of course, is that calling it an Einstein quote has itself been repeated over and over while people expect different results in getting it right. Einstein did say genuinely remarkable things about curiosity, imagination, and the limits of logic — but this particular line about insanity is not among them. He had enough good material without borrowing from a 1981 pamphlet.

Mahatma Gandhi’s actual writings are full of powerful, specific language about nonviolence and self-transformation — but this particular line, clean and bumper-sticker-ready, appears to come from a 1974 book chapter by educator Arleen Lorrance, who wrote: “One way to start a preventative program is to be the change you want to see happen.” Quote investigators have traced the attribution to Gandhi only as far back as 1987. Gandhi’s 1913 writings do explore a related idea — that changing yourself shifts how the world responds to you — but the crisp modern phrasing is almost certainly someone else’s.

What Gandhi actually said on the subject was messier and more human. He wrote about the difficulty of changing oneself, about how transformation was a lifelong struggle and not a motivational tagline. The polished version is a distillation — an improvement, even — but stripping away the context, and the attribution, loses something real.

This is perhaps the most beloved line Sherlock Holmes never said. Scholars have read all four of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels and all fifty-six short stories and confirmed: the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” appears nowhere. Holmes does say “Elementary” once, in “The Crooked Man” (1893), and he addresses Watson as “my dear Watson” in other places — but the two halves never appear together in Doyle’s work.

The full phrase seems to have been popularized by the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where a screenwriter apparently found it too good to leave out. From there it stuck, became the defining Holmes line, and eventually worked its way back into people’s memories of the original stories. It’s a case where a fictional character’s invented quote has overwhelmed the real one — which is a kind of mystery Doyle himself might have enjoyed.

You have probably “remembered” Humphrey Bogart delivering this line in Casablanca. You almost certainly haven’t, because he doesn’t say it. Neither does anyone else. What Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) actually says to the piano player is “Play it, Sam” — and later, Rick (Bogart) says “You played it for her, you can play it for me… play it.” Not a “Sam” or an “again” in sight.

The misquote has floated through popular culture for so long that it now feels more real than the film itself. Woody Allen even named a 1972 play after it, cementing the error in theatrical history. The actual lines are quieter and less punchy — which is perhaps why memory improved on them. Casablanca is full of genuinely great lines; this just isn’t one of them.

The original line, from 1 Timothy 6:10 in the New Testament, reads: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Three small words — “the love of” — make an enormous difference. The original verse is a caution against greed and obsession, not a blanket condemnation of currency itself. Money, in the original, is morally neutral; it’s the disordered attachment to it that causes harm.

The shortened version has been drifting through English conversation for centuries, shedding its qualifier along the way. It’s a reminder that even scripture gets misquoted, often in ways that reverse the original meaning. The full verse continues: “…which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” That’s quite a different statement than “don’t have money.”

This line is routinely credited to Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Mae West — whichever iconic woman seems most fitting in the moment. The actual author is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard historian who wrote it in 1976 in an academic article for American Quarterly titled “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735.” Her original context was a lament, not a rallying cry — she was observing how “well-behaved” Puritan women were largely invisible in the historical record because their quiet compliance left few traces.

Ulrich has written about the journey of her own line with considerable wry humor. She eventually published a book with the same title in 2007, tracing the phrase from bumper sticker to classroom poster to museum gift shop. She never intended it as a call to misbehave — but she’s made peace with the fact that it traveled much further as a piece of popular wisdom than it ever would have as a footnote in a scholarly journal.

The famous three-part saying about fooling “all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time” has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln for well over a century. There’s one problem: it appears nowhere in his recorded speeches, letters, or writings. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were covered closely by newspapers of the time, and nothing like it shows up. Two witnesses claimed, in 1910, to remember Lincoln saying it in 1856 — a half-century earlier. That’s a long stretch for memory.

Quote historians trace the structure of the idea back to the 17th-century French theologian Jacques Abbadie, and later to Denis Diderot in 1754. The Lincoln attribution appears to have been cemented by Prohibition-era speakers in the 1880s who liked the moral clarity of Lincoln’s name attached to an argument against deception. It’s a good line. Lincoln would probably have been fine with the credit — but he wasn’t the one who earned it.

Mark Twain actually did say something like this — but not quite this. When a New York Journal reporter inquired in 1897 about rumors that Twain was gravely ill, his response, as printed at the time, was simply: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” No “greatly,” no “reports” (plural). The more elaborate and quotable version appears to have been introduced by Albert Bigelow Paine in his 1912 biography of Twain, written two years after Twain died and therefore immune to correction.

This is a particularly tidy case — Twain genuinely made the remark, but the version everyone quotes is a slight embellishment of his actual words. It’s fitting, in a way. Twain spent his career making small things funnier and more precise. Someone did it to him after he was gone, and now even Twain scholars sometimes quote the improved version. He probably would have approved.