Who Really Said These 5 Famous Phrases?

This quote is almost always attributed to Sir Isaac Newton. The phrase appears in a letter that Newton wrote to English philosopher and mathematician Robert Hooke. However, while he may have made the words famous, Newton didn’t coin this iconic phrase. So who did?

It’s thought the quote actually originates with 12th century thinker Bernard of Chartres. Chartres was comparing contemporary scholars to the ancient scholars of Greece and Rome when he said “we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter."

A lot of people attribute this quote to blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe. Monroe famously played by her own rules, becoming an icon of pop culture and the sexual revolution. However, while she may have lived by the sentiment, it wasn’t her that said it, so who was it?

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian who specializes in early America and the history of women. A professor at Harvard University, Ulrich first wrote these words for an edition of American Quarterly in 1976, a full 14 years after Monroe’s death.

According to a large number of inspirational mugs and posters, this famous quote comes from none other than Albert Einstein. However, there’s no evidence at all that Einstein ever said it. And in fact, he wasn’t associated with the phrase until the 80s, decades after his death. Do you know who the real wordsmith was?

Civil rights campaigner and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown is the real author of the phrase. In her 1983 book Sudden Death, Brown attributes the quote to a fictional ‘Jane Fulton’. However, the idea of a link between repetition and insanity can be traced back to the 19^th century.

'Let them eat cake'

In his 12-volume autobiography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that ‘a great princess’ had told the country people to eat brioche when no bread was available. Although people assumed the princess to be Antoinette, the book was written in 1767, when the future queen was just 12 years old.

In 2017, the US Republican Party Tweeted an image of Abraham Lincoln alongside this inspiration quote. And although they believed the president was responsible for the words, there’s no evidence at all that Lincoln ever actually said them. So who should get the credit?

Self-help author Edward J. Stieglitz coined the phrase to advertise his 1946 book The Second Forty Years. The non-fiction work is a guide to ageing and is designed to help readers make the best of the second four-decades of their lives.