Quote sites run on trust, and trust runs on checking. Below are the most-shared attributions in the English-speaking internet, examined one at a time: what was actually said, who actually said it, and the evidence. QuotePlace marks every quote it can trace with a verified source on the quote's own page — this page handles the famous ones that fail the test.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Attributed to: Mahatma Gandhi · A paraphrase, not a quote
Gandhi never wrote this sentence. The closest documented passage, from a 1913 article in Indian Opinion, is longer and better: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.” The bumper-sticker version is a compression of that thought, coined by others decades later. (It circulates so widely that even our own catalogue carries it flagged as a paraphrase.)
Evidence: The sentence appears nowhere in Gandhi's Collected Works; the 1913 Indian Opinion passage is its documented ancestor.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Attributed to: Albert Einstein · Misattributed
There is no trace of this in Einstein's papers, letters or recorded remarks. Its earliest documented appearances are in Narcotics Anonymous literature around 1981, and a version appears in Rita Mae Brown's 1983 novel Sudden Death. The Einstein attribution came later still.
Evidence: Researchers at Quote Investigator traced the earliest instances to 1981–83; nothing in the Einstein archives matches it.
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Attributed to: Albert Einstein · No evidence
Animal-school fables are old — one version circulated in education writing as early as 1898 — but the fish-and-tree wording was attached to Einstein only in the 2000s, about fifty years after his death. Nothing in his published work or correspondence contains it.
Evidence: No source in Einstein's writings; the Einstein attribution is first found in 21st-century quote collections.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Attributed to: Mark Twain · Real — but misquoted
Twain really did write a death joke — almost this one. In May 1897, after a London reporter confused him with his seriously ill cousin, Twain responded: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The famous pluralised, polished version is a later improvement by retellers.
Evidence: Twain's 1897 note was printed in the New York Journal, 2 June 1897.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Attributed to: Voltaire · A paraphrase, not a quote
Voltaire never wrote it. The sentence was coined by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), where she used it to summarise his attitude towards intolerance — and later confirmed, in print, that the wording was hers.
Evidence: Hall clarified the line's authorship in a 1939 letter; it is a summary of Voltaire's position, not a quotation.
“Let them eat cake.”
Attributed to: Marie Antoinette · Misattributed
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche” in his Confessions, attributing it to an unnamed “great princess”. He wrote it in 1765–67, when Antoinette was a child still living in Austria; she did not arrive in France until 1770 and there is no record of her saying anything of the kind.
Evidence: The timeline alone rules her out: Rousseau's text predates her arrival in France.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Attributed to: Aristotle · A paraphrase, not a quote
This crisp sentence is the historian Will Durant summarising Aristotle in The Story of Philosophy (1926). Aristotle's underlying idea is real — the Nicomachean Ethics argues that we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts — but the quotable sentence is Durant's, not a translation of any Greek line.
Evidence: Durant's 1926 text is the earliest source; no corresponding sentence exists in Aristotle's works.
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
Attributed to: Benjamin Franklin · Real — but misquoted
Franklin did write the thought — about wine. In a 1779 letter to André Morellet he called the rain that falls on vineyards “a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy”. Beer appears nowhere in the letter; the beverage was swapped somewhere in the retelling.
Evidence: Franklin's 1779 letter to Morellet survives and is unambiguous about the subject: wine.
Attributed to: Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) · No evidence
Holmes says “Elementary.” and “my dear Watson” many times — but never the combined sentence in any of Doyle's sixty stories. The exact phrase was cemented by the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes and by earlier stage and parody versions.
Evidence: The combined phrase is absent from the entire Holmes canon, as any searchable edition confirms.
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Attributed to: Winston Churchill · Misattributed
No speech, book or letter of Churchill's contains this. The sentiment circulated in American advertising and commencement rhetoric of the 1930s–40s, and the Churchill attribution is a late borrowing of his wartime aura.
Evidence: The Churchill Project at Hillsdale College treats it as apocryphal; it is absent from the searchable canon of his speeches and writings.
A fine line of advice that Churchill, so far as any archive shows, never gave. It is absent from his speeches and writings, and print attributions to him begin decades after his death in 1965.
Evidence: No appearance in the Churchill canon; attributions postdate his death by decades.
“An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.”
Attributed to: Mahatma Gandhi · No evidence
The metaphor fits Gandhi's philosophy, which is exactly why it attached to him — but the sentence is not in his Collected Works. It was popularised by his biographer Louis Fischer, writing after Gandhi's death, as a summary of his position rather than a quotation.
Evidence: Absent from the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi; the wording is traced to Fischer's 1950 biography.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Attributed to: Abraham Lincoln · No evidence
Lincoln may have said something like it — but nobody wrote it down at the time. The sentence was first attributed to him in print decades after his assassination, and it appears in none of his speeches, letters or the recollections published by those who knew him best.
Evidence: Earliest print attributions date to decades after 1865; the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln do not contain it.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.”
Attributed to: Mark Twain · Misattributed
This is a mother's advice, printed by her son. H. Jackson Brown Jr. published it in P.S. I Love You (1990) among the sayings of his mother. The Mark Twain attribution appeared afterwards, without any Twain source behind it.
Evidence: Brown's 1990 book is the earliest documented source and names his mother as the speaker.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
Attributed to: Eleanor Roosevelt · No evidence
The tidy three-part ranking is not found anywhere in Roosevelt's columns, books or papers. Triads of this shape circulated in print long before her — a version about minds and conversation was already being quoted in the 19th century.
Evidence: No source in Roosevelt's archive; similar formulations predate her public career.
“Money is the root of all evil.”
Attributed to: The Bible · Real — but misquoted
The verse — 1 Timothy 6:10 — says something meaningfully different: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Dropping “the love of” turns a warning about greed into a claim about currency, which is the opposite of the text's point.
Evidence: The text of 1 Timothy 6:10 (King James Version) is checkable in any Bible.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
Attributed to: The Bible · Misattributed
Not a Bible verse at all. John Wesley used the phrase in his 1778 sermon “On Dress” (he seems to have been quoting a saying already in circulation), and an earlier form appears in Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), where bodily cleanness is linked to reverence towards God.
Evidence: The phrase is absent from scripture; Wesley's 1778 sermon is its famous early platform.
“All that glitters is not gold.”
Attributed to: William Shakespeare · Real — but misquoted
Shakespeare wrote “All that glisters is not gold” — The Merchant of Venice, Act II. “Glitters” is the modernised substitution that took over in popular usage; the original word survives on this site, on the quote's own page.
Evidence: The First Folio text reads “glisters”; the line is the motto inside Portia's golden casket.
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle.”
Attributed to: Marilyn Monroe · No evidence
No interview, letter, diary or contemporary profile records Monroe saying this. The passage surfaces in internet quote collections in the 2000s — more than forty years after her death in 1962 — and spreads from there.
Evidence: No primary source exists; the earliest appearances are 21st-century quote aggregations.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Attributed to: Winston Churchill / Mark Twain (variously) · Older than the famous name
The image is older than either famous claimant. Jonathan Swift wrote in The Examiner in 1710: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” The trousers version is a 20th-century American re-dressing of Swift's line, later pinned on both Twain and Churchill without evidence for either.
Evidence: Swift's 1710 essay predates both attributions by more than a century.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Attributed to: Isaac Newton · Older than the famous name
Newton really wrote it — in a letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676 — but he did not invent it. The image belongs to Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century, recorded by John of Salisbury in 1159: dwarfs on the shoulders of giants see further than the giants themselves.
Evidence: John of Salisbury's Metalogicon (1159) records Bernard's metaphor five centuries before Newton's letter.
“Nice guys finish last.”
Attributed to: Leo Durocher · A paraphrase, not a quote
Baseball manager Leo Durocher did say something like it — in July 1946, gesturing at the opposing New York Giants' dugout, he said the nice guys were “all over there, in seventh place”. Reporters compressed the jab into the famous four words; Durocher later liked the compressed version enough to title his autobiography with it.
Evidence: Contemporary New York newspaper reports of July 1946 record the original, longer remark.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Attributed to: Albert Einstein · Actually true
This one is real. Einstein said it in his interview with George Sylvester Viereck, published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929 — a reminder that the most famous attributions are not all fake, just in need of checking. Which is the point of this page.
Evidence: The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, “What Life Means to Einstein”.