Questions tagged [quotes]
Use this tag when the question is about whether someone said or wrote a quote.
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Did Netanyahu say (apparently in 2001) "I actually stopped the Oslo Accords"?
There are a few sources claiming he said this ("I actually stopped the Oslo Accords"), but all of those I found are rather left-wing. E.g. a 2012 opinion piece in Haaretz or a piece in ...
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Is this quote/poem by Mahmoud Darwish? "if they ask you about Gaza.."
A quote about Gaza has become a meme on social media:
And if they ask you about Gaza, tell them that it has a martyr, a martyr helps him, a martyr takes pictures of him, a martyr bids him farewell, ...
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Did Netanyahu express support of Hamas in 2019?
When discussing the ongoing Israel/Hamas war, the following quotes occasionally come up.
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and ...
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Did Plato say “we can change reality by changing our mind”?
The complete quote is:
Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.
I found this quote on Goodreads and on this blog and on Pinterest. However, none of these cites ...
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Did US president Theodore Roosevelt call Democrats "prison vermin"?
According to two very non-primary references, the President called Democrats "prison vermin".
The first is the 1902 Political X-rays, saying that it is quoting from an 8 November 1901 letter ...
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Would US president Theodore Roosevelt refer to his political enemies as "vermin"?
A publication of the Library of Congress says:
Mr. Foulke in his letters reveals an unusual frankness in letting President Roosevelt know of the attitudes of his political enemies -- "small ...
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Did Alan Turing ever say “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine”?
Goodreads lists the quote under Alan Turing but I always thought it was merely from the movie (The Imitation Game) and couldn't find anything similar in his published works
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Did Stalin say in 1940 that "the action of the Red Army is also a matter of world revolution"?
The quote appears in a 2001 paper in English... and only there in that exact formulation.
[Stalin's] policies during and after World War II amounted to “National Bolshevism”—the use of the Soviet ...
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Did B. R. Ambedkar say it is shameful for women to enter politics?
B. R. Ambedkar was an Indian politician in the 1940s-50s who helped write the Indian constitution.
The Indian government hosts a web-page of his writings and speeches. Vol. 40, Page No. 467 is in ...
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Did Netanyahu say "We will turn Gaza into a deserted island" in early October 2023?
According to a October 7, 2023 Al-Jazeera article, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:
“We will take mighty vengeance for this black day,” the Israeli leader said in a televised address. “...
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Did a soldier who confirmed babies decapitated by Hamas previously call for "wiping out entire Palestinian villages"?
According to Anandolu Agensi [Oct, 12]:
To this day, only one soldier has said he saw babies were beheaded. David Ben Zion of Unit 71, an extremist settler who earlier this year called for “wiping ...
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Did Benjamin Netanyahu say this about Christian Zionists? [closed]
The following quote is attributed to Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel.
It appears in inspiringquotes.us.
It was shared by a couple of Facebook users, and the quote or part of ...
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1
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Did John Steinbeck say "It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving"?
I often see the quote attributed to John Steinbeck, "It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving ...", when explaining the difference between sympathy and empathy, e.g. ...
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1
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Did Voltaire say/write "Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."?
There is a popular saying:
Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be
said.
On the internet, many pages attribute this quote to Voltaire - however, I could not find any ...
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Did Richard Dawkins say Pope John Paul II was a hypocrite about Darwinism?
Multiple sources (including Richard Dawkin's own web-site) quote the following from an article by Michael Ruse, which he supposedly wrote for the Playboy magazine.
We who love science must realize ...
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Did Bertrand Russell say, "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, ..."?
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
—Bertrand Russell
Many books and websites attribute this ...
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Did Einstein say "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater"?
I've seen the quote below attributed to Einstein in several places
Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.
Even on sites where several other Einstein ...
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Did Einstein say this about crisis?
There is an often quoted text allegedly by Einstein, about the way to confront and overcome a crisis:
Let’s not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same things. A crisis can be a ...
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Did Albert Einstein say "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler"?
I was reading wikipedia page of Python, there I saw these lines:
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than ...
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Did Charles Schulz say, "All you need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt"?
The following saying is often attributed to Charles M. Schulz, or to one of the characters in his famous comic strip, Peanuts.
All you need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.
...
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Did Richard Feynman say that if all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week?
The following quip is often attributed to the physicist Richard Feynman:
If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week.
See for example Quote Master, quotefancy, ...
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Did Charles Dickens write this quote about Husayn ibn Ali?
Husayn ibn Ali is an important figure in Islam.
Several quotes pages attribute a quote about him to English novelist Charles Dickens:
If Hussain had fought to quench his worldly desires… then I do ...
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Did Margaret Mead say that a healed femur is the earliest sign of civilization?
A 1997 issue of the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, in an article I could not identify, contains the following story:
The noted, late anthropologist, Margaret Mead, was once asked, "...
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Did Giordano Bruno say this quote about swimming against the torrent?
I recently saw an image where this quote
Non temete nuotare contro il torrente, è d'un anima sordida pensare come il volgo, perché il volgo è in maggioranza
is attributed to 16th Century Italian ...
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Was this quote on a clay tablet about unruly kids written by an Assyrian?
I've been sent an email saying that every generation thought that kids were too stupid or unruly, with this text as evidence:
"Our Earth is degenerate in these later
days; there are signs that ...
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Is Youtube primarily a male domain?
This is a quote from Jordan Peterson. I've provided two examples, one in which he qualifies the major viewership as being "young" males, in the other it's a generalised statement about all ...
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Did Tsar Nicholas II really call for a "short, victorious war"?
Back in 2018, an article in the Political Studies Association blog quoted Tsar Nicholas II as saying that what his people needed was a "short, victorious war" prior to the Russo-Japanese War ...
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Was this Communist Party Directive from 1943 genuine?
When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them after
suitable buildups as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic and used the
prestige of anti-fascist and tolerance organisations to ...
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Did Truman say this about helping whichever of Germany and Russia were losing during the war?
Taken from Good Reads:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't ...
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Did the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff claim the USSR would convince all Japanese?
An opinion piece posted on 10.05.2016 08:46 by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey on Pravda states that Peter Kuznick claimed:
The Japanese leaders did not know that at Yalta Stalin had agreed to
come into the ...
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Did Hitler say "Thank God I've always avoided persecuting my enemies"?
I found an old book called The Bad Guys' Quote Book (by Robert Singer) in a secondhand bookstore.
On the cover there is a quote from Adolph Hitler, which I have also found in other paraphrases:
"...
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Did Sophocles write "Success is dependent on effort"?
I'm trying to find the source of the quote "Success is dependent on
effort." There are lots and lots of quotation sites that attribute it to
Sophocles. However, I have yet to find a single site that ...
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Is this quote about the Bhagavad Gita properly attributed to Albert Einstein?
The Bhagavad Gita is Hindu scripture.
The blog of Sivana East claims that Albert Einstein said:
When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so ...
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Did Hitler say that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy"?
There are a bunch of sources claiming he said it, but the earliest one I was able to find is a 1968 book The Arms of Krupp, which also gives it in German as "privates Unternehmertum könne in der ...
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Did Einstein say the "if you judge a fish" quote that many are attributing to him?
The quote:
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to
climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is
stupid.”
I'm just not confident that this is ...
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Did Joseph Goebbels say "Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty"?
The quote, "accuse the other side of that which you are guilty" is often attributed to Joseph Goebbels.
For example this meme and it also appears in me.me and memegenerator.net.
I have looked for it ...
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Is there documented evidence that George Kennan opposed the establishment of NATO?
I have no trouble believing George Kennan opposed NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe; quotes about that are easy to find, e.g. on Wikipedia, using relatively recent thus accessible sources.
On the ...
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Did Woodrow Wilson say he was a 'most unhappy man' that 'unwittingly ruined' the USA?
According several "sources" including Alex Jones, Peter Joseph, users of Facebook, and 'Occupiers of Wallstreet,' Woodrow Wilson said:
I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. ...
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Did Time Magazine publish an article in 1931 explaining how to prepare and roll marijuana?
According to a Feb 3, 2021 blog entry ("Why Is Marijuana Called Reefer?") of Kushfly, a medical cannabis company, Time Magazine published an article in 1931 explaining how to roll a "...
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Did Napoléon Bonaparte ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days in a letter before his arrival?
According to British historian Andrew Roberts, Napoléon Bonaparte wrote a letter to his wife Joséphine, in which he wrote "to her, ‘don’t wash for three days’" to spice up their reunion. ...
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Did Louis Pasteur admit on his deathbed "Bernard [the inventor of terrain theory] was right"?
On many 'health' sites defending terrain theory (the theory that the state of the body, not just germs, is the primal factor for disease development) one finds quotes that Louis Pasteur is said to ...
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Did Neil Gorsuch found the ‘Fascism Forever Club’ while in school?
The Daily Mail is reporting that SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch formed a "Fascism Forever" Club in prep school.
In the article:
Gorsuch founded the ‘Fascism Forever Club’ during his freshman year at
...
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Did Richard Feynman say that anyone who claims to understand quantum physics is lying or crazy?
Theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman is often attributed with the quote
Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy.
Example of the claim.
Is this apocryphal, or did ...
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Is the Gregorian calendar the "most accurate calendar ever devised"?
This statement comes from a Joe Rogan show episode where he chats to Neil de Grasse Tyson. His statement is about the Gregorian calendar, and goes as follows:
"Point is, this was hard-earned, and ...
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Did Lincoln say, "When we buy steel made in America, we get the steel and the money too"?
In "Industrial Policy Comes Full Circle" (Dec. 15), Clyde Prestowitz (Wall Street Journal, 2022-12-11, 2022-22-15 print edition p. R17):
Lincoln said: "I don't know much about tariffs, ...
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Did Malala Yousafzai ever say "socialism is the only answer"?
I just saw this picture making the latest rounds today on Reddit's /r/socialism. The picture has the quote attributed to Malala Yousafzai,
Caption reads,
I am convinced
socialism is the
only ...
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Did Julius Caesar say "If you can't defeat your enemy, have him as your friend"?
In my country (Italy) there's a popular saying that goes "Se non puoi sconfiggere il tuo nemico, fattelo amico", translated to english as "If you can't defeat your enemy, have him as ...
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Did Voltaire say/write "In 100 years, the Bible would be a forgotten and unknown book?"
The phrase "In 100 years, the Bible would be a forgotten and unknown book" is attributed to Voltaire in a bunch of Christian sites.
Examples:
Sermon Illustrator
The Destin Log
Does anyone ...
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Did Ferdinand Foch say "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years"?
It is often said (e.g. [1], [2]) that, around the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch said "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty ...
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Did Mohammad Ali Jinnah in 1945 say, “Muslims who are opposing Pakistan will spend the rest of their lives proving loyalty to India”?
A widely-retweeted Dec 12 2019 tweet by @TonyAshai reads
Mohomad Ali Jinnah said in 1945, “Muslims who are opposing #Pakistan will spend rest of their lives proving loyalty to India” and #Modi and #...
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