In the years leading up to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the rebel-rousing Sons of Liberty used an engraving of what they called “The Boston Massacre” to…
Category: Political quotes
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
The quote “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is often mistakenly attributed to the Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran and frequently to Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Curran’s…
The story behind the phrase “The Year of Living Dangerously”
Google has a cool tool for researchers of words and phrases (including quotations) called the Ngram Viewer. It graphs the occurrence of a word or phrase in books published between…
“Why are you not here?” – Thoreau’s famous (apocryphal) question to Emerson…
Fake quotes are sometimes harder to identify and debunk than “fake news,” especially when they are cited by hundreds of books and thousands of websites. A good example is the…
President Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech
One of the famous quotations linked to the date June 26th is a line President John F. Kennedy spoke in German on June 26, 1963: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Kennedy…
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…
“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,…
“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…