Quote Attribution Quotes

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.

I think that the media should stop with this unnamed source stuff, put names on a piece of paper and print it. If people aren't willing to put their name next to a quote, then the quote shouldn't be listed, period.

Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac.

Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.

I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.

Rees's First Law of Quotations: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to George Bernard Shaw.

I remember certain lines and whose they are.

My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw - which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.