The myth

The things people say: this month, we present a selection of FT’s favourite false quotations.

The “truth”

Mark Twain never said “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” (Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye did).

“Let them eat cake” was being attributed to various out-of-touch fat cats long before Marie Antoinette was born.

“That government is best which governs least” wasn’t Thomas Jefferson’s; nor even Thoreau’s, presumably, since the latter used it in quotation marks.

Patrick Henry didn’t say “Give me liberty or give me death,” nor did James Otis coin “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Hermann Goering was not responsible for “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” which excellent line comes from a 1933 play by Hanns Johst.

Edmund Burke’s “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” was voted the world’s favourite quotation in 2004 – but has never been found in Burke’s writing, and is unrecorded before 1968.

British PM Jim Callaghan never said “Crisis? What crisis?” – a hostile press invented the career-killing phrase on his behalf.

Headline writers can also claim Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good”.

Sadly, nobody really thought JFK said “I am a doughnut” on a visit to Berlin; pedantically, his attempt at “I am a Berliner” should have left out the indefinite article, but the crowd reaction showed that no one doubted what he meant.