Continuing with March 9th's List Serve's 15 famous misquotes.
10. THOMAS JEFFERSON-- "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." He probably said it, but it was essentially said before. It was originally said by Irish judge John Philpot Curran: "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
9. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-- Even more true today. "Nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes." In 1724, Edward Ward wrote, "Death and taxes, they are certain." In 1716, Christopher Bullock wrote, "Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes."
8. HARRY TRUMAN-- "The buck stops here." Got it from a 1945 gift from El Reno, Oklahoma bearing those words. A Yale historian discovered an El Reno newspaper photo from 1942 that shows the phrase on the desk of a colonel at the federal Reformatory in El Reno where the gift came from.
7. WILLIAM PRESCOTT-- "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Then fire low." 1775 at Bunker Hill. Frederick the Great said it in 1755 during the Seven years War.
6. CHIEF SEATTLE-- "How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land." These are the opening and closing lines of a very long speech. However, it was written in 1971 for an ecological movie.
A Word, A Word, My Kingdom for a Word. --Da Coot
No comments:
Post a Comment