Every once in a while, I like to do a “guest post” here, using something I previously posted on my other quotation blog, QuoteCounterquote.com. I recently heard some news commentator…
“Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.”
To paraphrase Firesign Theatre, everything most people know about some famous quotations is wrong. A notable example is the famous line “Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be…
How a political backlash turned “a grand old rag” into “a Grand Old Flag”…
On January 19, 1906, American composer, playwright and performer George M. Cohan copyrighted a new song he’d written titled “You’re a Grand Old Rag.” It was one of the songs…
Origins of the terms “massive retaliation” and “brinkmanship”…
A while back I noticed a news story that said: “North Korean missile tests signal return to brinkmanship.” It made me decide to look up the origin of that term.…
“Greed is all right” — the forerunner of “Greed is good”
Wall Street whiz Ivan Boesky was riding high in 1986. During the early 1980s, he’d made hundreds of millions of dollars trading stocks, doing real estate deals and masterminding leverage…
“Come Together” — the Timothy Leary political campaign slogan that became a Beatles song…
The best-known slogan coined by Sixties counterculture celebrity Timothy Leary is the one he created to promote the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs: “Turn on, tune in, drop…
“Too cheap to meter” – the infamous nuclear power phrase…
In the annals of the long, still-ongoing debate over nuclear power, the most infamous words are undoubtedly “too cheap to meter.” The origin of this phrase is a speech given…
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Like virtually all African Americans who grew up in Mississippi during the first half of the 20th century, Fannie Lou Hamer endured many injustices in her life. Some went beyond…
“I coulda been a contender!”
When On the Waterfront was first released to American movie theaters on July 28, 1954, the film’s director, Elia Kazan, was worried about how well it would do on opening…