Who Said It: Writers and Poets
This is the biggest topic set in the game, and it is dominated by two men who between them are credited with roughly half of everything witty ever said in English. Neither of them said most of it.
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The two great attribution sinks
Oscar Wilde contributes eight quotations here and Mark Twain seven, more than a quarter of the set between them. In the wider world of quotation their share is far larger than that, because both men occupy a peculiar cultural role: they are the default authors of any unowned witticism in English. Wilde takes the epigrams, Twain takes the folksy ones, and a genuinely enormous number of lines have migrated to them from journalists, after dinner speakers and anonymity.
The tell is in the sourcing. Wilde's entries in this set split cleanly. Several come straight out of the plays, where the line has an act and a scene: the remarks about temptation, about the gutter and the stars, and the exchange about losing one parent being a misfortune and losing both looking like carelessness. Those are documented to the page. Others carry no source we can verify, and are marked accordingly. Twain skews further towards the unverifiable end: several of his best known lines here are labelled Attributed, including the one about being more disappointed by the things you did not do, which has never been traced to anything he published.
A contested one we kept, and flagged. The line about people forgetting what you said and what you did but never forgetting how you made them feel is universally credited to Maya Angelou, and she used it. Versions of the sentiment appear in print before she did, notably from the sales writer Carl W. Buehner in the 1970s. Angelou made it famous and made it hers, which is why the attribution stands, but it is a good example of how a quotation can be genuinely someone’s without being originally theirs.
The ones you can look up
| Quotation | Who | Source |
|---|---|---|
| To be, or not to be | William Shakespeare | Hamlet |
| All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others | George Orwell | Animal Farm, 1945 |
| A woman must have money and a room of her own | Virginia Woolf | A Room of One’s Own, 1929 |
| The truth is rarely pure and never simple | Oscar Wilde | The Importance of Being Earnest |
| If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything | Mark Twain | Notebooks |
Reading the register
The useful skill this set trains is not memory, it is ear. Once you have played a few rounds you start to notice that these writers do not sound alike, and the difference is reliable enough to guess on. Wilde inverts an expectation in the second half of the sentence and lands on a paradox. Twain builds a plain declarative and then undercuts it with a homely image, usually involving weather, dogs or old age. Angelou writes in the first person about endurance. Emerson and Thoreau write imperatives about self reliance. Dr. Seuss rhymes.
That is genuinely how strong quiz players work. They rarely recall the specific line. They recognise the shape of the sentence, eliminate two of the four options on register alone, and then choose between the remaining two on subject matter. Our guide on getting better at trivia goes into why that inference is often more valuable than raw recall.
Who else is in here
Beyond the big two, this set covers Maya Angelou, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Jonathan Swift, Hans Christian Andersen, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Anais Nin, Ayn Rand, D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Bob Dylan and Dr. Seuss. It is deliberately wide: a set made only of nineteenth century English novelists would be easier and much less interesting, because the distractors would all be plausible for the wrong reason.
If you want the companion reading, our guide to famous quotes that are misattributed covers the mechanics of how lines drift between authors, with several examples that appear in this deck.
Frequently asked questions
Why are Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain so over-represented in quote quizzes?
Both are default attributions for unowned witticisms in English. Wilde absorbs epigrams and Twain absorbs folksy observations, so lines by journalists and after-dinner speakers migrate to them over time. We mark the ones we cannot source.
Did Maya Angelou say people will never forget how you made them feel?
She used the line and made it famous, and it is credited to her. Similar phrasing appears in print earlier, notably from Carl W. Buehner, so it is a case of a quotation being genuinely someone’s without being originally theirs.
How many questions are in this set?
Fifty two, the largest topic set in Who Said It. Each round draws ten of them at random, so the set takes several rounds to see in full.
Do I need an account to play?
No. There is no sign-up and no limit on rounds. Progress in the daily challenge is stored in your own browser.
More Who Said It sets
- Scientists and inventors31 quotes from Einstein, Edison, Curie, Hawking and the Apollo 13 transmission everyone misquotes.
- Leaders and activists56 lines from Churchill, King, Mandela and Roosevelt, and the Voltaire quote Voltaire never wrote.
- Founders and business26 lines from Jobs, Gates, Sandberg, Ford and Disney, including the Apple line a copywriter wrote.
- Philosophers and proverbs21 lines from Aristotle to Nietzsche, plus the proverbs with no author at all.
- Athletes and coaches23 lines from Ali, Jordan, Kobe, Gretzky and Lombardi, and who really wrote the butterfly line.
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