September 1, 1939 is now known as the day when World War II started. On that day, Germany’s Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler ordered his military forces to invade neighboring Poland.…
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…
“The rich are different”… The legendary “exchange” between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway…
If you’re a quotation buff, you’ve probably heard of a legendary exchange about “rich people” that supposedly took place between the American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway…
“There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford.”
It is often claimed that the familiar expression of compassion “There, but for the grace of God, go I” is based on a quote by the 16th Century English Protestant…
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…
“You have the right to remain silent.”
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…
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…
“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…