Wait, who said that? Your favorite quote probably isn't from the person you think

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast:

Most likely that favorite quote you've been throwing around didn't come from the person you thought. From the movie quote "Luke, I am your father" from Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back to the quote "golf is a good walk spoiled" by Mark Twain - Both incorrect by the way. Every generation misquotes in their own way. Some are just plain misquoted, while others are just remembered wrong (take that Star Wars quote for example. Darth Vader actually says "No, I am your father.")

Fred Shapiro, lecturer and editor of the Yale Book of Quotations and The New Yale Book of Quotations has made it his business to study quotes and make sure they are correct. He sat down with the Team at 5 Things to talk quotes.

He said our cultures today is geared more toward conciseness with snippets and soundbites. That people are less likely to read through a book or an argument. They want something shorter. Punchier. He said some of the misquoting comes from that mindset. He said movies quotes are very popular and often misquoted and condensed.

But does it really matter if a person gets the gist of what is being said? Shapiro said it does matter.

Don't believe us on some of the misquotes? Check it out for yourself.

To see the clip from Apocalypse Now mentioned in the episode, click here.

How about that Sarah Palin quote. Click here for her ABC News interview and click here for the Saturday Night Live sketch.

Still not sure about former President Barrack O'bama misquoting Maya Angelou? Click here to watch the video.

For Fred Shapiro's books click here and here.

To follow James Brown on Twitter, click here.

Podcasts:True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. 

James Brown:                  Hello, and welcome to Five Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, July 24th, 2022. Thanks for joining me. Every Sunday, we take an idea, a story, a question, and go deep. And this week, we're talking about quotes. In 2014, then President, Barack Obama presented the National Medal of Arts and Humanities at The White House. A little over a minute into his remarks, he said ...

Barack Obama:                The late great Maya Angelou once said, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."

James Brown:                  The following year, the US Postal Service introduced a stamp dedicated to Angelou, with her face on it, next to that same exact quote. It was an instant collectible, because Angelou never said that. Children's author Joan Walsh Anglund did in 1967. It even appears in one of her books. Mark Saunders, the Postal Service's spokesperson at the time, told The Washington Post that numerous references said the quote was Angelou's. And that it was somehow attached to her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

                                          And that's not all. There's at least a half dozen other quotes that people say are Angelou's that are in question by people like Fred Shapiro. He's our guest today.

                                          Shapiro lectures and works on special projects at Yale Law School. He's the Editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, and The New Yale Book of Quotations. We'll link to both in our description. In these huge books, he spends more than 2000 pages verifying and explaining misquotations. From Mark Twain to Sarah Palin, Shapiro told me that every generation misquotes in their own way. Fred Shapiro, welcome to Five Things.

Fred Shapiro:                   Hi. Thanks for having me.

James Brown:                  One of the most quoted people of all time is Mark Twain. And as I understand it, we almost always get it wrong. Why is that?

Fred Shapiro:                   Oh, well, you're definitely right about almost always getting it wrong. That if someone tells you that Mark Twain said something, the one thing you can be sure of is that Mark Twain probably did not say that something. He did have many witty things that he said, but the things that people are quoting nowadays are usually things that were said much later than his time by other people. But they gravitate toward him. He's a quotation magnet, that people want to believe that some folksy person, some famous person said something that they like. But it's often not at all the case.

James Brown:                  Is there a specific Twain quote that gets misquoted a lot, or more than others?

Fred Shapiro:                   Well, there are so many of them. Just one example is, "A golf is a good walk spoiled," which is almost always attributed to Mark Twain. But actually the earliest evidence of anyone using it was in 1913, after Twain was dead. It's anonymous in terms of who said it. We don't really know who originated it. A lot of famous quotes come out of the mouth of some obscure person who is quickly forgotten.

James Brown:                  That's a really interesting concept. Someone says something that is somewhat profound, yet that idea, that profound idea does not become well-known until someone who is famous' name is slapped on it.

Fred Shapiro:                   Yes. Yes. It's not just Twain that is a quotation magnet. You also get people like Yogi Berra, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, that quotes get routinely attributed to when they never said anything like that. Sometimes you can tell the language and the diction, the tone of a quote is often very modern, but it gets attributed to someone from a past century when they just didn't talk the way that we talk today.

James Brown:                  You're known for that type of research. You've written a book on this, at least one. I'm just wondering about your process. How do you find out that a quote is not from the person it's attributed to?

Fred Shapiro:                   Well, I'm lucky that I came along at a time when the tools to do fantastic research of this kind emerged. The standard quotation dictionaries were Bartlett's Quotations and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. And they started in the 19th century or the early 20th century when there were no computers to help in research. When I realized that these quotation books were not reliable and not the product of deep research, I started developing my own quotation book, The Yale Book of Quotations, which has now become a standard quotation book.

                                          I compiled The Yale Book of Quotations just at the time, I was lucky, just at the time when there was a huge explosion of computer internet databases, where you could search millions and billions, even trillions of newspaper articles, historical newspaper articles, old newspaper articles, recent newspaper articles. And also books, millions of books can be searched now online. That you could type in the words of a quotation and the database, like Google Books or newspaper databases, will search a vast amount of material.

                                          You can readily find what is the earliest record of something appearing in print. I was able, time after time, to rewrite the standard stories of famous quotations and get much closer to the truth of who actually came up with the quotes that we like so much.

James Brown:                  When you say that those quotation books, those classic quotation books, the Bartlett's of the world, are flawed, that they weren't the product of deep research, from your perspective, how were they put together? Were they simply just ad hoc, just pulled from what was popular, the popular belief at the moment that they were published?

Fred Shapiro:                   Well, going back hundreds of years, there were people who would compile commonplace books, they were called. That whenever they read something that they really liked, that they thought was profound or funny, they would write it down in a book, a kind of journal that they would keep. There've been people for hundreds of years doing that kind of thing. Not systematically, not even capturing all the famous quotes. I was shocked to find that Bartlett's and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations often leave out some of the most famous quotes.

                                          They just miss them. It's like, if you looked in a dictionary, Webster's Dictionary, and they forgot to put in the word umbrella. They overlooked it. You would be shocked. It's almost incomprehensible. But it happens a lot with the quotation dictionaries, because they were compiled unsystematically out of private collections of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs that people liked. By using computer-assisted methods, I was able to fill in the gaps of famous quotes left out of other quote books, and also to really trace back for every famous quote. I did research to try to trace back as far as I could, when they originated.

                                          The people that compiled these books, they were knowledgeable, well-read people and they did their best. But they just didn't have the methods that are now available. I just came out with The New Yale Book of Quotations, which goes even further than the original one. It was just published by Yale University Press, The New Yale Book of Quotations. And that fully, in every entry, tries to trace back, do real research to trace back the origins of a quote.

James Brown:                  I think it's clear from our conversation so far that misquoting is not new, that it's something that's happened time and time again. Is there something about the misquotations of today that are different than they were in the past?

Fred Shapiro:                   Our culture generally is going toward conciseness, snippets, soundbites, to people are less likely now to read through a book, to try to struggle with a long argument of 300 pages. They go for things that are shorter. Some of the misquoting comes out of that. I'll just give one example that in the movie Apocalypse Now ... I mean, movie quotes are very popular.

                                          In the movie Apocalypse Now is the famous quote, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory." That's a very commonly repeated quote from Apocalypse Now. But the actual quote in the movie, if you watch the movie, listen to the movie, Robert Duvall actually says ...

Robert Duvall:                 I love the smell of napalm in the morning. One time, we had a hail bomb for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of them, not one sticking (beep) body.

Fred Shapiro:                   "The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill smelled like victory." That's been condensed in the popular mind to a short quote. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory." That happens a lot. Things get "remembered in a way that's punchier and shorter". Even literary quotes like Shakespeare.

                                          Hamlet has a famous quote, "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well." Well, actually Shakespeare wrote, "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio." But I knew him well, sounds better. It's punchier. The popular mind changes quotes to make them flow better, to make them shorter. I think that's happening more and more in our time now than it did in the past.

James Brown:                  That sounds like the impact of social media.

Fred Shapiro:                   Absolutely. Absolutely. Social media has a huge impact on this kind of thing. That people often say, well, to find out the wording of a quotation or who originated or how it's supposed to be spelled out, you just have to go to Google. That's all you have to do.

                                          But if you do a Google Search, you're going to get the full impact of millions of people misquoting things. And because Google comes up with an alleged quote or an alleged author of a quote doesn't mean that's really the origins, or the way something should be articulated.

James Brown:                  What would you say to someone who would argue that I get the gist of the idea, that it's not important to know specifically where this concept, this quote, this line is from?

Fred Shapiro:                   Often, if you get the source wrong of a quote, you get the ideas wrong, and then the lesson of what the person was trying to say when they originated it. Particularly in politics now, that political quotes often get distorted to serve some political agenda. That can have a big impact on our politics, on our vision of the world. People tweak quotes or distort quotes for their own purposes.

James Brown:                  Sarah Palin actually comes to mind in that concept that you're laying out. I don't know if you know the quote I'm speaking of.

Fred Shapiro:                   Which quote is that?

James Brown:                  It's widely believed that she said that, "I can see Russia from my house."

Fred Shapiro:                   Okay. That's a great example.

Charlie Gibson:               What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

Sarah Palin:                      They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.

Charlie Gibson:               Do you favor putting Georgia ...

Fred Shapiro:                   What she was saying was not literally that she could see Russia from her house, but that Alaska is close to Russia. That got blown up into the ultimate proof of Sarah Palin being a fool, but that's not really what she said. If that line is to be criticized, the way to criticize it would be that she was presenting this as some kind of foreign policy credential that she was from Alaska and Alaska's near Russia. But the actual words got misquoted. In fact, "I can see Russia from my house," came out of the mouth not of Sarah Palin, but of Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live.

Tina Fey:                          I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy. And I can see Russia from my house.

Fred Shapiro:                   In my book, I explain the truth of all that.

James Brown:                  One of the things that has got you attention in recent times is your work on the Pledge of Allegiance. What did you find when you researched that?

Fred Shapiro:                   We found that the person that it was attributed to did not say it, could not have said it. Because we found in a newspaper article where the Pledge of Allegiance appeared before Francis Bell being the person that always gets the credit for it, says that he wrote it. It's clear that he stole the credit from someone. And it's possible that person was actually a 13-year-old school boy in Kansas.

James Brown:                  Wow.

Fred Shapiro:                   That's a striking example of where the real story is pretty different from the accepted story that you would find if you looked any place other than in an authoritative quotation book, like The New Yale Book of Quotations.

James Brown:                  There's another thing that story brings to mind. Is it easier to do what Bellamy may have done, meaning steal the Pledge of Allegiance from a 13-year-old perhaps now, than it was back then? Because I can make an argument for either.

Fred Shapiro:                   In a sense, it's easier now, because you can find someone else's words online and then take it as your own and it's lost in a sea of misinformation on the internet. But it's also harder in the sense that people like me can come along and do the research. And in some cases, publicize it from The New York Times or from Wikipedia.

                                          In that sense, it's harder nowadays ultimately to get away with stealing credit for something. But it's not easy. You have to really disprove one of these phony stories. You have to get The New York Times interested in running an article or get it into Wikipedia, which now is a source that a lot of people would look at.

James Brown:                  So it's easier to get the concept, harder to maintain the illusion that it is yours?

Fred Shapiro:                   Yes, although I have to say that the forces of misquotation are pretty strong. And it sometimes is a losing battle to try to get the real story out.

James Brown:                  The forces of misquotation. I love that phrase.

Fred Shapiro:                   Yeah.

James Brown:                  Well, Fred Shapiro, thank you for joining me.

Fred Shapiro:                   Well, I enjoyed talking with you. Maybe your listeners can think some more about the ideas of quotations and misquotations.

James Brown:                  If you like the show, write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. And do me a favor, share with a friend. What do you think of the show? Send me an email at jabrown@usatoday.com, or find me on Twitter at James Brown TV. I love hearing from you.

                                          Thanks to Fred Shapiro for joining me. You can find links to his books in the description. Thanks to Alexis Gustin for her production assistance. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with Five Things You Need To Know for Monday. And from all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown. And as always, be well.