12 Famous Quotes Everyone Misattributes

Everyone knows the famous line, “Houston, we have a problem.” In truth, however, the actual quote by Apollo 13 Command Module pilot Jack Swigert was, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” 

True, the real quote there isn’t quite as snappy as the version you’ve likely heard. But at least “Houston, we have a problem” is rightly credited to the right person—which is more than can be said for the famous quotes on this list. 

1. “Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.”
2. “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
3. “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
4. “What is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is obviously not true.”
5. “You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
6. “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”
7. “The ends justify the means.”
8. “It’s just life, Jim, but not as we know it.”
9. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.”
10. “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
11. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
12. “The British are coming!”

“Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.”

No matter how you phrase this famous line, no, it isn’t not Mark Twain’s. And neither, for that matter, was it originally said by Benjamin Franklin, despite him often receiving the credit for it, too. 

It is true that Franklin used a version of this line in a letter in 1789 (writing, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”), but it was likely the phrase was already known to him by that time, as the earliest version of it actually comes from the script to a theatrical farce, The Cobbler of Preston, written by an English actor and playwright named Christopher Bullock in 1716. 

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”

Mark Twain didn’t say this, either. Instead, this is a mangling of a speech given by Clarence Darrow in 1922, which included the line, “I never killed anybody, but … I have had a great deal of satisfaction over many obituary notices that I have read.”

“Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

The internet loves this quote, but Marilyn Monroe likely never said it. Instead, this famous line was once quipped by future Pulitzer-winner and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1976. 

“What is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is obviously not true.”

Versions of this snappy line have been widely attributed to Winston Churchill online, but this is both a misattribution and a misquote. Confusingly, the original line here does appear in Churchill’s writings, in an essay included in his 1937 collection Great Contemporaries; however, the line in question is actually a direct quote from Churchill’s fellow British prime minister James Arthur Balfour.

His original words, which Churchill merely quotes in his own book, were, “In that oration, there were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true.”

“You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

This is another line the internet likes to claim was Winston Churchill’s, but it’s actually a paraphrasing of a line from an 1845 essay by Victor Hugo. 

“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”

Countless wordings of this famous saying abound online, a lot of them wrongly claiming it was said by Confucius. In fact, it’s from the writings of Lao Tzu.

“The ends justify the means.”

Niccolò Machiavelli did say that you “must consider the final result” (or words to that effect), but he never said the line “the ends justify the means,” neither in English nor Italian. It could be argued that “the ends justify the means” is something of an interpretation of Machiavelli’s words, but it is perhaps more likely that this saying is instead based on a similar line (“Outcomes justify actions”) in the Roman poet Ovid’s Heroides. 

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“It’s just life, Jim, but not as we know it.”

Watch every Star Trek episode and movie, and you’ll never hear Spock say that line once. Instead, these words were first used in the lyrics of “Star Trekkin’,” a novelty song by the British band The Firm that was a No. 1 single in the UK in 1987. 

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.”

Nope, Mahatma Gandhi probably didn’t say this. Instead, these lines likely became famous after they were used by U.S. labor union advocate Nicholas Klein in an address to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1918: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.”

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Despite what you might read online, there’s no evidence to suggest that Oscar Wilde ever said these words. In fact, fact-checking website Quote Investigator hasn’t been able to track down an early version of this precise quote at all, instead finding a vague version of it (“I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else”) in an essay by the mystic and theologian Thomas Merton in 1967. 

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

A favorite motto of free speech advocates everywhere, Voltaire didn’t actually say this famous line. Instead, it was concocted by the writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who used it as a means of summarizing Voltaire’s attitude in her 1906 biography, The Friends of Voltaire. 

“The British are coming!”

Given that there were British patrols all over the Massachusetts countryside at the time, Paul Revere probably didn’t shout anything at all as he made his famous ride. (And given that most of the locals would have considered themselves British anyway, even if he did say his famous quote, it wouldn’t have made much sense anyway.)

Instead, the earliest record of this line comes from an anecdote told by Dorothy Scott (future wife of John Hancock), who recalled an unknown man from Lexington calling by her house on the night of Paul Revere’s ride, calling out that “The British are coming!” So either the words are Scott’s or the unknown man’s.