Who Said It: Leaders and Activists

56 questions in this set · Free, no sign-up · Updated August 27, 2026

Political speech is the best documented quotation there is, which makes the misattributions in this field unusually easy to catch. Two of the most famous lines here were written by somebody other than the person who gets the credit.

The Voltaire quote Voltaire never wrote

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is one of the most quoted defences of free expression in the English language, and it is not by Voltaire. It was written in 1906 by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her book The Friends of Voltaire, published under the pen name S. G. Tallentyre. Hall was summarising Voltaire's attitude in her own words, and put the summary in quotation marks as an illustration of his position. The quotation marks did the rest. Hall herself later explained the mistake, without much success.

This is the single best example in the whole game of how a paraphrase becomes a quotation. Nobody forged anything and nobody lied. A biographer wrote a good sentence about her subject, and the sentence outlived the attribution. That is why our data credits Hall and says in the source field that it is often misattributed to Voltaire, rather than quietly listing Voltaire and moving on.

Churchill: eight entries, two categories

Winston Churchill is the largest single contributor to this set and the most extreme quote magnet in political history. The wartime speeches are documented to the day: the offer of nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat came in his first speech as prime minister on 13 May 1940, and the promise to fight on the beaches came on 4 June 1940 after Dunkirk. Those are transcript quality attributions.

Then there is the other Churchill, the one who supposedly produced a stream of brisk motivational aphorisms about optimists, pessimists and continuing to walk through hell. Several of those appear here marked Attributed because the documentary trail runs out. The International Churchill Society maintains a public list of things he is widely believed to have said and did not, which is longer than most people expect.

Documented to the date

The academic footnote that became a bumper sticker

The Ulrich entry deserves its own paragraph. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a historian, and she wrote “well-behaved women seldom make history” in 1976 in a scholarly article about Puritan funeral sermons. Her point was descriptive and slightly melancholy: ordinary, pious, well-behaved colonial women left almost no trace in the historical record precisely because they behaved as expected. The line escaped onto t-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers as a slogan encouraging misbehaviour, which is close to the opposite of what she meant. She later wrote a whole book about what happened to her sentence.

Who else is here

The set spans Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, both Roosevelts, Eleanor Roosevelt in her own right, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller, Booker T. Washington, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt and Julius Caesar. Eleanor Roosevelt's five entries make her the most quoted woman in the deck, which reflects reality: she wrote a syndicated newspaper column six days a week for nearly three decades, which produces a great deal of quotable text.

Frequently asked questions

Did Voltaire say I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it?

No. Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it in 1906 in The Friends of Voltaire, as her own summary of his attitude. She placed it in quotation marks as an illustration and the attribution stuck.

Did Gandhi say first they ignore you, then they laugh at you?

There is no record of it in anything Gandhi wrote or said. The closest documented source is a 1918 address by the American union leader Nicholas Klein. Our data marks the line as attributed rather than sourced.

What did Laurel Thatcher Ulrich actually mean?

She was making a historical observation in a 1976 article: women who behaved as expected left almost no trace in the record. The line was later adopted as a slogan encouraging the opposite of what she described.

Is this set harder than the daily challenge?

It is more concentrated. Every option in a question comes from the same field, so you cannot eliminate answers by category. The daily challenge mixes topics, which often makes individual questions easier.

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• Founders and business26 lines from Jobs, Gates, Sandberg, Ford and Disney, including the Apple line a copywriter wrote.
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