10 Most Unfortunately Misattributed Quotes

These people never said these things. Or did they? (No, they didn't.)

Here’s another post from almost ten years ago. Time flies when you’re misattributing quotes on purpose.

Sometimes, celebrities say stupid things, so we mock them.

Other times, they say something deeply profound, so we admire them. Take this powerful quote from Meryl Streep:

Deep, right?

It was posted all over social media, usually accompanied by an ecstatic “Oh my God, she’s my hero!” exclamation.

You may have posted it yourself. And why wouldn’t you? Why not share a quote that makes you admire Streep as a talented actress and a wise life guru? Meryl Streep rocks!

Except, of course…Meryl Streep never said that.

The quote belongs to José Micard Teixeira, a life coach from Portugal.

But people rarely care about finding out such trivial details. Who’s José, anyway? It sounds much better coming from Meryl Streep.

In fact, we can be so willfully insistent in our denial that we’ll read a detailed article that specifically talks about how the quote was misattributed to Meryl Streep and yet still leave the following comment on that very article:

“I no longer have patience for certain things…such as actually processing and understanding the words that I read.”

This isn’t an isolated case.

Misattributed quotes are all over the Internet.

Morgan Freeman never made that comment about homophobia and Pope Francis, while extremely progressive, never said that the traditional notion of God was outdated.

Hell, there are so many false, misunderstood, and misattributed quotes out there that I once wrote a TopTenz article just about that.

This got me thinking…what if we matched some actual quotes to the most ill-suited people imaginable?

Could we make these misattributed quotes sound extremely wrong?

So then I tried.

Feel free to share these on your Pinstagrams and Facetweets—your friends will love it:

1. “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”

Actual quote from: Arnold H. Glasow

2. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Actual quote from: Franklin D. Roosevelt

3. “The secret to my success is that I bit off more than I could chew and chewed as fast as I could.”

Actual quote (allegedly) from: Paul Hogan

4. “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

Actual quote from: André Gide

5. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Actual quote from: Wayne Gretzky

6. “A man is known by the silence he keeps.”

Actual quote from: Oliver Herford

7. “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

Actual quote from: Henry Ford

8. “Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real.”

Actual quote from: Thomas Merton

9. “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Actual quote from: Mark Twain

10. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

Actual quote from: Dr. Seuss

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Originally published on June 30, 2015 on Nest-Expressed.com.

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