Phrases of famous people, about which they themselves have no idea

If Omar Khayyam, Churchill, Shakespeare and Bismarck were able to look at Facebook, they would be very surprised. After all, users of the most popular social network persistently attribute to them popular phrases that these great people never uttered.



In an era when we read less and more often, “smart statuses about life” are published, fake quotes have become a real epidemic. It has come to a point where writers, politicians and even presidents are repeating them without knowing it.



To prevent our readers from stepping on the same rake, we offer a fake parade of the most famous fictional quotes. Some of them, I confess, all my life considered real.

Popular phrases

1. "Elementary, Watson!"
   Hard to believe, Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous character never uttered this famous phrase. And she first appeared in the novel by Palem Grenville Woodhouse “Psmit the journalist” and was pronounced in jokes.
   
   
   GettyImages
2. Calm down, Masha, I am Dubrovsky.
   Those who carefully read Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s novel “Dubrovsky” could see that there was no such phrase in it. In the novel, the main character says other words.
   
   
   
   GettyImages. I'm not what you're suggesting," he continued, numbing his head, "I am.
   Not Frenchman Deforge, I'm Dubrovsky. Maria Kirilovna cried out.
   - Don't be afraid, for God's sake, you shouldn't be afraid of my name.
   
   
3. “If they have no bread, let them eat cakes.”
   The story that Queen Marie Antoinette addressed these words to a starving people is fiction.
   
   GettyImages
   
   The phrase first appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography Confessions. The book was published in 1765. The future Queen of France was only 10 years old at the time.
   
   
4. "And yet it spins!"
   Since school, we know that the great Galileo Galilei proved the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. In 1633, the court of the Inquisition forced the scientist to renounce a daring idea at the time. But at the last minute, he changed his mind and said, “It’s spinning!”
   
   GettyImages
   
   A beautiful legend, but its direct evidence historians have not found. The first written mention of the phrase dates back to 1757.
   
   
5. “He who was not a radical in his youth has no heart, who has not matured into a conservative, has no mind.”
   They say that these are Churchill’s words, but he never said them.
   
   
   
   Yes, and could not, because his wife Clementine all his life was a liberal.
   
   
6. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
   Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” So we’ve always stolen great ideas without a conscience, Steve Jobs said about Apple’s history in an interview.
   
   GettyImages
   
   However, the brilliant artist never uttered such words. The poet Thomas Eliot. “Young poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
   
   
7. Be careful with your desires – they have the property to come true..
   The phrase is often attributed to Bulgakov Voland. But in the novel “Master and Margarita” it is not.
   
   
   GettyImages
8. “Any cook can run the state.”
   “Will the Bolsheviks retain state power?” Lenin said, “We are not utopians.” We know that any labourer or cook cannot immediately take over the government.” As you can see, the original phrase has a different meaning.
   
   
   GettyImages

Interesting fact: there is a site where anyone can generate a picture with a “wise saying” that never existed. Do you have any favorite fake quotes?