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…
Category: Political quotes
“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…
“J’Accuse!” (“I Accuse!”)
On January 13, 1898, the front page of the French newspaper L’Aurore featured a scathing letter about the “Dreyfus Affair” written by popular author Émile Zola and addressed to the…
True or false: Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness? (Hint: you’re right!)
During the very first Colbert Report show on October 17, 2005, the witty faux Conservative media pundit Stephen Colbert unleashed the word truthiness on the world. (Click here to see…
“About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”
Some observers have expressed surprise that two populist, anti-establishment candidates who many people view as “extremists” won sizeable percentages of the votes in the 2016 presidential primary elections. But in…
The origins of the “The Domino Effect”…
Contrary to what many sites on the Internet say, President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not coin the famous Cold War term “the Domino Effect.” He did use the phrase “falling…