You probably know the famed “Miranda Rights” warning police are supposed to recite to someone they are arresting. Even if you’ve never been arrested and heard it spoken by a…
Year: 2022
The origin of the proverbial political “smoke-filled room”
Although smoking is either banned or not tolerated in most meetings today, the idea of a meeting of power brokers making deals behind closed doors “in a smoke-filled room” is…
Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” quote
On May 17, 2012, Republican presidential candidate, Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), said something that was later cited as one of the factors that caused him to lose the election…
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The animal characters Walt Kelly created for his classic newspaper comic strip Pogo were known for their seemingly simplistic, but slyly perceptive comments about the state of the world and…
“Now he belongs to the ages” – or maybe to the angels…
Three famous quotations are linked to the assassination and death of President Abraham Lincoln. Many history and quotation books say that after John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14,…
The awful origin of “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
On March 7, 1839 the play Richelieu: or, the Conspiracy, by the British politician and author, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, premiered at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. Few people today…
The 1941 New Yorker cartoon that created the expression “Back to the old drawing board!”
Drawing boards have been used by engineers and architects for more than two centuries. But the saying “back to the old drawing board” is more recent and can actually be…
“Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
You can find many different lists of “books that changed the world” on the Internet. Those lists vary considerably. But there are some books that show up on almost all…
“All the news that’s fit to print.”
As noted by many sources, “All the news that’s fit to print” — the famous slogan of The New York Times — is linked to the date February 10, 1897.…