As Gandhi said, if it’s on the internet it must be true

It has been a constant source of regret throughout my lengthy but so far relatively undistinguished career in the business of bashing out words on a keyboard that I have failed to interview Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King.

In my defense, some of them were dead before I was born, so interviewing them would have required the assistance of a spirit medium. But still.

What all those non-interviewees had in common was a way with words. The mots justes, the quotable quotes, the bons mots all flowed from them like an unstoppable river, in a way of which the rest of us can only dream. In comparison, most of us are tongue tied. We digress. We ramble. We are vague. On the rare occasions that we produce a genuinely memorable phrase, it was usually said first by someone else — often someone on my list of non-interviewees.

Not only that, but these great wordsmiths also required no cue or prompt to create a felicitous assembly of words that grabbed the attention, not just of the moment, but of posterity. For example, had I been speaking to Churchill about the courage and sacrifice of the mostly young English fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in the skies above southeast England in the summer of 1940, it would not have been necessary to ask: “So, Mr. Churchill, in your opinion, all things considered, would it be true to say that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few?” No, the old boy came out with that zinger entirely off his own bat. Moreover, he did so in a speech to the House of Commons: it was thus recorded for posterity by Hansard, obviating the need for 1940s journalists to Google it.

These great wordsmiths required no cue or prompt to create a felicitous assembly of words that grabbed the attention

Ross Anderson

It is true to say that not all of Churchill’s arrows hit the bull’s eye. In 1942, for example, after the first significant British victory of the Second World War, at El-Alamein in Egypt, he told an audience: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I’m sorry, say what now? That one needed a bit of work, one feels: maybe he came up with it one morning immediately after his standard breakfast, a pint of vintage Champagne.

Like all those on my list of non-interviewees, Churchill is as famous for what he never said as for what he did. For example, you will be familiar with his oft-quoted gag about how Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, once they have exhausted every other possibility. Not only did he never say that, why would he? His mother was from Brooklyn, and insulting his own ancestry was not Churchill’s style.

A close rival of Churchill’s in the realm of fake quotes is Albert Einstein — who, as everyone knows, defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Except there is no record of his ever having said any such thing. And again, why would he? Einstein was a scientist — and doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is pretty much the basis of scientific research.

Most people blame the World Wide Web for the ease with which words can be ascribed to people who never uttered them. After all, as Mahatma Gandhi famously said, if it’s on the internet it must be true. And it is certainly the case that, if you type a famous phrase into a search engine, it will helpfully attribute it for you — in many cases, suspiciously, without any context to where, when and in what circumstances the words came to be said.

Most people blame the World Wide Web for the ease with which words can be ascribed to people who never uttered them

Ross Anderson

That is why it is commonly believed that Voltaire said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (he didn’t); that Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time” (he didn’t); that Twain said: “The only two certainties in life are death and taxes” (he didn’t); that Stalin said: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” (he didn’t); and that Edmund Burke said: “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” (he didn’t).

And fake quotes spread quickly. In fact, I am tempted to observe that, as Twain said, a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has its boots on — except that’s something else he never said.

A close relative of the fake quote is the “almost quote.” To stick with Twain, he never quite said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. If you’re going to quote him, check it and get it right. And while everyone knows that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” that isn’t quite what the poet Congreve wrote either: again, check it and get it right.

Perhaps the last word in these matters should go to an unlikely source — the legendary US baseball coach Yogi Berra, who found as much fame for his sporting prowess as for his unique deployment of the English language. Berra’s genuine quotable quotes are in a class of their own: “It was deja vu all over again,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and my personal favorite, when discussing the hugely popular Ruggeri’s restaurant in St. Louis — “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

Even Berra, however, became frustrated at the quantity of words attributed to him that never passed his lips, and was eventually moved to declare: “Half the things I said, I never said.”

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.