“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

In 1897, two of the most famous residents of Hartford, Connecticut were Mark Twain and his friend and fellow writer Charles Dudley Warner, who was then editor of the local newspaper, the Hartford Courant.

They had been close friends for decades.

Back in 1873, they had even written a satirical novel together, titled The Gilded Age. (It was the only novel Twain ever wrote with a collaborator and its title coined the term that came to be used for the greed-fueled, corruption-tinged post-Civil War era it lampooned.)

Twain and Warner are also both connected to a famous joke about the weather that’s commonly given as:

       “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

This line is most widely credited as a quote by Twain. But it doesn’t appear in anything he wrote or in any of his recorded speeches.

It is also widely credited to Warner and there is a published source for that attribution. But that source — an editorial published in the Hartford Courant on August 24, 1897 — doesn’t exactly clarify the facts.

For one thing, the editorial was unsigned.

Warner was writing editorials for the Courant at the time, so he probably did write it.

However, even assuming he did, there are two other quotation accuracy problems: the editorial itself credits the saying to someone else and gives it in a form that’s slightly different than the familiar traditional “quote.”

What the editorial actually says is:  

“A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.”

It’s likely that the popular version of the “quote” was derived from or popularized by the version in this editorial.

It also seems likely that the “well known American writer” referred to was Warner’s friend Mark Twain.

However, when asked, Twain denied it and credited Warner with writing the quip.

A few years ago, on his Quote Investigator site, Garson O’Toole documented two sources published prior to 1897 that attributed versions of the quote to Warner, thus adding to the evidence that he — rather than Twain — coined, or at least popularized, the saying.

Interestingly, one of those sources claims Warner made the remark with reference to the weather of New England.

That makes me wonder if Charles Dudley Warner may also have inspired another famous saying that’s often mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain:

       “If you don’t like the weather in New  England, just wait a few minutes.”

Many websites and books, including some otherwise authoritative ones, like The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, claim that Twain said this in a speech to the New England Society in New York City, on December 22, 1876.

In fact, he didn’t.

If you actually read the speech you find that, while Twain did make several remarks about the unpredictability of New England weather, he did not say the “If you don’t like the weather in New  England…” line. (Or anything close to it.)

My conclusion is that, while thousands of books and websites talk about the famous weather quotations attributed to Mark Twain, nobody has done anything about them that definitively clears up their true origins.

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

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“She was the people’s princess” (but not the first) . . .

In 1995, after she was separated from but still married to Britain’s Prince Charles, Princess Diana said in a BBC television interview: “I’d like to be a queen in people’s hearts.”

For many people, she was.

Diana became and remains beloved for her high-profile support for various charities, like the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, her un-Royal-like rapport with the public and, of course, for her beauty.

Her tragic death in a car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997 led to a huge outpouring of emotion from those who knew her and from the public.

Tony Blair, Leader of Britain’s Labour Party, was British Prime Minister at the time of Diana’s fatal crash.

On the night of her death, he was one of many notable people the press asked for reactions.

Blair’s widely-published response was poignant and memorable. He said:

       “She was the people’s princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories forever.”

Since then, the phrase “the People’s Princess” has been inextricably linked to Diana.     

In his Yale Book of Quotations, quote expert Fred Shapiro notes that Blair wasn’t the first person to use that nickname for her.

More than a decade earlier, it had appeared in a souvenir booklet about Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s 1983 tour of Australia.

The heading of a section in in that publication was “Diana: the People’s Princess.”

However, it was Blair’s more widely-publicized use that made the phrase forever associated with the beautiful, doomed “Princess Di.”

Diana was not the first British Royal to be called “the People’s Princess.”

A century earlier, Royal watchers and the press used that nickname for Princess Mary Adelaide, the Duchess of Teck (1833-1897).

This reflected the fact that Mary Adelaide was one of the first of “the Royals” to actively support a broad range of public charities.

Indeed, if she had been as stunningly beautiful as Diana, she might be more widely known today. Alas…

Well, you can judge for yourself about Mary Adelaide’s looks. Her other nickname was the highly unflattering moniker “Fat Mary.”

The photo shown here is one of the better ones I could find of the first “Peoples Princess.”

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Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

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“Give me liberty or give me death!” – famous words Patrick Henry probably didn’t say...

In late March of 1775, the American Revolution had not yet started. The “shot heard ‘round the world” was still a few weeks away.

But, to a growing number of Americans, a fight seemed inevitable if Great Britain continued to try to enforce its oppressive “Intolerable Acts” and taxes.

Some of the more militant American political activists — such as Patrick Henry — had begun urging local colonial governments to create militias that could be mustered to defend against or attack British troops.

Henry was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses at the time.

On March 23, 1775, at a meeting of that legislative body in Richmond, he gave an impassioned speech in favor of mobilization.

According to legend, Henry ended his speech with these famous words:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Patrick Henry’s rousing address played a role in the House of Burgesses’ decision in favor of creating a Virginia militia. Henry himself was appointed a Colonel of the First Virginia Regiment.

However, no one knows exactly what he said in his speech on March 23, 1775.

Henry didn’t write down the speech or any notes about it at the time — or in the years before his death in 1799. Nor was any other written record made of the speech when he gave it in 1775 or during his lifetime.

So, why is the famous quote that ends with “give me liberty or give me death” attributed to Patrick Henry? And, why do many books and websites reprint what they cite as the “full text” of Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech?

The answer is: because another Virginia politician named William Wirt created his own reconstructed version of the speech in a biography he wrote about Henry and Wirt’s version became famous. 

Wirt decided to write the biography about five years after Henry died. Over the next ten years, he corresponded and talked with people who knew Henry, including some who were present when he made his moving speech.

One of them was Thomas Jefferson. Another was a judge named St. George Tucker, who gave Wirt extensive notes on what he remembered of the speech.

In 1817, Wirt’s book was published. He titled it Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry.

The version of Henry’s March 23, 1775 speech in that book was based heavily on Judge Tucker’s recollection. 

Obviously, of course, it would be impossible for anyone to recreate, word-for-word, any speech given 42 years earlier, based purely on other people’s memories.

Yet, what seemed to annoy a number of people who knew Henry much more than Wirt’s poetic license in recreating Henry’s speech was his overly idealized portrayal of the man.

Jefferson called Wirt’s biography “a poor book” that gave “an imperfect idea of Patrick Henry.”

John Taylor, another Virginia statesman who knew Henry, called it “a splendid novel.” 

Comments from other contemporaries of Henry were even less kind.

Nonetheless, Wirt’s book was extremely popular and, over the years, his version of the speech that Henry gave on March 23, 1775 came to be thought of and portrayed as a real transcript — until modern historians and quote mavens began to look into it.

Experts on American history and quotations who have carefully studied the facts generally dismiss the idea that Wirt’s recreation of the entire speech is or could be accurate.

One researcher quoted in a post on the Colonial Williamsburg website concluded that “generations have been deceived into believing in the literalness” of the speech.

In The Yale Book of Quotations, Editor Fred Shapiro calls the text of the speech as reconstructed by Wirt “questionable.”

Ralph Keyes, author of The Quote Verifier and many other well-researched books about quotations and language, summed up his verdict in an NPR radio interview in 2006. When asked if Patrick Henry actually said “give me liberty or give me death,” Keyes answered: “Unfortunately, he didn’t.”

Keyes said his conclusion is that “William Wirt…put ‘give me liberty or give me death’ in Henry’s mouth.”

Other experts think that Henry might have said “give me liberty or give me death” or at least uttered the phrase “liberty or death.”

Those are certainly memorable words. And, later in 1775, “LIBERTY OR DEATH” was used as a slogan on the flag of the Culpeper Minute Men Battalion, a unit of Patrick Henry’s First Virginia Regiment.

However, the rest of the alleged final sentences at the end of the speech Henry gave on March 23, 1775 — and the “full text” of the speech reprinted by many books and websites — should probably be credited to either William Wirt or St. George Tucker instead of Patrick Henry.

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What were the “top quotes” of 2013?

I recently looked through a couple dozen lists of “top” and “best” quotes of 2013 and came to a disappointing conclusion.

In terms of truly memorable quotations that generated new idiomatic expressions and catchphrases or that will show up in future books of quotations, the year 2013 was pretty much a bust.

Browse through some of the lists of the supposed top or best quotes of 2013 at this link yourself and you’ll understand why I say that.

For example, as far as I can tell from the lists of the “top” or “best” political quotes of the year, no politician said anything in 2013 that will be cited by large numbers of history or quotation books years from now.

And, what line from a movie released in 2013 do you remember and hear people using regularly, the way people remember and make quips with lines like “May the Force be with you” or “I’ll be back” or “You can’t handle the truth”? If there were any, they’re not in the lists of the top or best movie lines of 2013 that I’ve seen.

Similarly, can you think of a catchphrase from a TV show that debuted in 2013 that has embedded itself in our language? Anything that will become as familiar as lines like “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” or “To boldly go where no man has gone before” or “Well isn’t that special?” I’m guessing not.

So, what are the top quotes of 2013?

The most widely-published annual list of “top quotes” is the one released by Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations. It gets reprinted by thousands of newspapers and websites.

Shapiro has been issuing his list of the top quotes of the year since 2007. As he explained in a video on the Yale News website, his choices aren’t simply based on whether a quote has become “famous.” He says he also picks quotes that he views as historically important or revealing of the spirit of the times.

Even given those broader parameters, I think he had a lot better options to pick from in previous years.

You can read Shapiro’s complete 2013 list

at this link.

His number one quote of the year is a comment President Barack Obama made about the Affordable Health Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) at a news conference on November 14, 2013:

“With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it: the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate.”

With respect to Fred, that may be a historic admission but it’s not a very memorable quotation.

It’s a comment on a famous promise Obama repeated in various ways in 2009 and 2010, usually summarized as “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

The most cited version is probably the one in his speech to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, in which he used the word period at the end for emphasis:

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

That statement wasn’t given much notice in 2009 but, ironically, it did become a famous quote in 2013.

When Obamacare began to be implemented this past year, opponents of the plan discovered that some Americans would not actually be able to keep their existing health care plans if those plans didn’t meet certain minimum quality criteria in the law’s fine print.

So, during 2013, Republican politicians and pundits gleefully (and endlessly) reminded everyone that Obama had previously said if you like your health care plan, you could keep it. Politico.com actually dubbed it “The Lie of the Year” for 2013 — even though Obama didn’t say it in 2013.

Indeed, there is only one quotation on Fred Shapiro’s list of the top quotes of 2013 that I think will likely be considered a “famous quote” in the future. It’s actually famous already, in the sense of being familiar to most reasonably aware people and frequently cited, mocked and satirized.

But it was also uttered prior to 2013.

It’s the oft-parodied remark made by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, at a press conference on December 21, 2012:

     “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Shapiro included it on this year’s list because it was uttered after he issued his 2012 list in mid-December of last year.

So, I’m guessing that in his list of the top quotes of 2014, Fred may include a few that were uttered shortly after he issued his 2013 list.

One is now paraphrased as “Santa is white.”

That’s the shortened version of some immediately controversial and widely-covered remarks made by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on December 11, 2013.

Responding to an article she’d read which said the constant depiction of Santa Claus as a white man makes some black children feel uncomfortable and excluded, Kelly opined:

     “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is...Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact – as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that.”

Kelly later said her remarks were intended to be humorous, but nobody really believed it. And, mentions of “Santa is white” quickly became — and will likely remain — a popular target of scorn and satire by Liberals and comedians in the future.

There were some other politically-incorrect statements by another TV celebrity that came to light after Shapiro’s issued his list of top quotes for this year.

Yep, I’m referring to the remarks that Phil Robertson, star of the Duck Dynasty reality TV show, made about homosexuals and African Americans in an interview in the January 2014 issue of GQ magazine, which actually hit newsstands and made news in December of 2013.

As you’ve probably heard (unless you’ve been living off the grid somewhere), Robertson compared homosexuality to bestiality. He also suggested that homosexuals won’t get into heaven.

Specifically, when asked what he thought was sinful, Robertson is quoted as responding:

     “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson also managed to offend African Americans in his GQ interview, saying:

     “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The Duck Dynasty patriarch’s comments generated a ton of press and controversy.

I don’t know if they’ll show up in future editions of Bartlett’s or the Yale Book of Quotations. But given the attention they generated, I will be surprised if Fred Shapiro doesn’t mention them in his next annual list of top quotes.

Happy New Year from This Day in Quotes!

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“Wise Latina” and “Too big to fail” – two top quotes of 2009 that were actually uttered years ago

Every year, a number of “quotes of the year” lists are published.

My favorite is the annual list issued by Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the excellent Yale Book of Quotations.

But my own picks for the top quotes of 2009 include some that are not on Fred’s list.

Two of them share an unusual characteristic. They were both made famous in 2009, but they are not new quotes.

In late May of 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a judge of Hispanic descent, to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

Republicans and conservative talk show hosts raised various objections and issues, hoping to prevent her confirmation by the Senate. The thing they dug up that seemed to get the most media attention was a comment Sotomayor had made eight years previously.

In a speech at the Berkeley School of Law on October 26, 2001, Sotomayor noted that gender and cultural background affect any judge’s view. However, she added:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Only a handful of people had ever heard of the quote until it was used in the debate over her nomination in 2009.

When conservatives claimed the quote showed Sotomayor was a reverse racist, it created a media firestorm.

Sotomayor was confirmed anyway. But the hubbub over her “wise Latina” remark made it one of the most notable quotations of 2009 — even though she’d said it years before.

The second notable quote that had a delayed rise to fame in 2009 is the phrase “too big to fail.”

It gained wide use during the past year to defend and deride the recent government bailouts of some of the country’s largest financial firms. But it was actually coined 25 years ago, during another government bailout.

In 1984, Continental Illinois — the seventh largest bank in the country at the time — faced insolvency due to overly aggressive lending policies.

The bank’s lobbyists and federal financial regulators warned that, if Continental were allowed to “fail,” it would threaten dozens of other banks and the entire economy.

Therefore, they argued, Continental should be bailed out with taxpayers’ money.

And, it was. Continental ultimately received $4.5 billion from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

On September 19, 1984, during Congressional hearings on the bailout, Congressman Stewart B. McKinney (R-Conn) observed wryly:

“Let us not bandy words. We have a new kind of bank. It is called too big to fail. TBTF, and it is a wonderful bank.”

Continental Illinois survived thanks to the government’s largesse. In 1994, it was acquired by Bank of America.

McKinney’s “too big to fail” also survived. But, but until, recently it was an obscure phrase known primarily to financial insiders.

In the most recent bank crisis, financial institutions received $700 billion from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), because they were deemed “too big too fail.” One of them was Bank of America.

The TARP funds first began to be disbursed by the Bush administration late in 2008. This year, as the Obama administration continued and expanded the bailout, the widespread use of “too big to fail” made it (in my opinion) one of the top quotes of 2009.

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