Why are quotes so often misattributed? 

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed with my husband, as in moments of weakness I do. But what is the source of the quotation?

The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it: a few big names – Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde – attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings.

So, talking of iron, Churchill’s phrase the iron curtain had been used before him. It secured attention, though, when he used it in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’

Most popular

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Someone found that the phrase had been used by Vasily Rozanov in 1918 in his book The Apocalypse of Our Times: ‘An iron curtain is being lowered, creaking and squeaking, at the end of Russian history.’