That's Not My Quote Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.

While often rendered as "I knew him well" the actual line ends with "Horatio." ("Hamlet", Act 5, Scene 1). The actual line from "MacBeth" is "double, double, toil and trouble." The actual line from "The Life and Death of King John" is "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily" (Act 4, Scene 2)
"The rest is science" is a misreading of "The rest is silence", the last line of Hamlet's dying soliloquy. (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2)

Answer: Marie Antoinette

The source of the quotation comes from the autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, "Confessions", which was written in 1767. At the time, Marie Antoniette was a 12 year old princess living in Austria, and it would be three years before she married Louis XVI.

There is contention among historians as to whether the quote is genuine or whether Rousseau made it up. Some historians believe Rousseau was talking about Maria Theresa of Spain. She was the first wife of Louis XIV; they were married from 1660 to 1683.

The memoirs of Louis XVIII seem to back up this claim. The actual quote in French, attributed to a "great princess" is "S'ils n'ont plus de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche."

Answer: Abraham Lincoln

The "Ten Points" are a series of statements which promote free market conservatism, and were written by Reverend William John Henry Boetcker. He was a Presbyterian minister who published a pamphlet called "The Ten Cannots" in 1916. The axioms became conflated with Lincoln in 1942 when a conservative organization published them on the same sheet as authentic Lincoln quotes. Lincoln is probably the most frequently misquoted US President. Numerous politicians have claimed that Lincoln made statements when there is little evidence he actually did. Even President Obama, who comes from Illinois, has misquoted Lincoln.

Answer: P.G. Wodehouse

It was Wodehouse in the 1909-1910 novel "Psmith, Journalist." While "My Dear Watson" and "Elementary" appear in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Crooked Man" (1893), they are not linked together. The actual origin of the line is somewhat obscure. While it may have been used on the stage during the 1890s, it gained popularity when Sherlock Holmes became a film character in the 1930s. Wodehouse was a humorist known for his eccentric characters, and is probably most famous for creating bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his clever butler Jeeves.
The lines from Wodehouse were:
"That's right," said Billy Windsor. "Of course."
"Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary," murmured Psmith.

Answer: Hanns Johst

Hanns Johst was a German playwright. The line occurs in "Schlageter", a 1933 play written to celebrate Adolf Hitler's rise to power and promote Nazi ideology. The statement is made by Friedrich Thiemann, a wartime friend of the play's protagonist. Its translation from the original German is actually ""Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1) Hermann Goering was the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, in Nazi Germany. Streicher was a notrious anti-semitic propagandist for the Nazis. Adolf Hitler ... If you don't know who Hitler is, well just go and Google him.

The line has also been attributed to Nazi leaders Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

Answer: Horace Greeley

The quote comes from John Barsone Lane Soule, a reporter with the Terre Haute, Indiana Express. Greeley reprinted the article by Soule, and since Greeley was about a 100 times more famous, his name got attached to it. Greeley reprinted Soule's complete article with full attribution, but the mistaken attribution continues to this day. Greeley was one of the most influential journalists in the United States between 1840 and 1872.

In 1872, he was both the Liberal Republican and Democratic candidate for president against Ulysses Grant. Greeley lost the election, and died a few weeks after.

Answer: True

Since the topic of the quiz is miquotations, the answer should be rather obvious. A close look at both the radio and television transcripts reveals that Joe Friday never actually said his most famous line. The closest he got were "All we want are the facts, ma'am" and "All we know are the facts, ma'am." Dan Aykroyd does use the line in the comedy version of "Dragnet" released in 1987.

Answer: Frank Zappa

The actual quote was first said by science fiction writer Harlan Ellison in the 1960s. Ellison had been a leading name in science fiction since the 1960s, when he wrote the "Star Trek" episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" (1967). Ellison is an incredibly prolific author and has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar awards. Zappa does make a similar statement in his autobiography, "The Real Frank Zappa" (1989), but that was decades after Ellison.

Answer: Michael Caine

While he is credited with the line, Michael Caine did not actually say it until "Educating Rita" in 1983, and that was as an inside joke.
Peter Sellers started things by doing a very good impression of Caine on Michael Parkinson's BBC talk show in October 1972. Sellers noted Caine's penchant for throwing out odd bits of trivia - 'Did you know that it takes a man in a tweed suit five and a half seconds to fall from the top of Big Ben to the ground? Now there's not many people know that!' was Sellers' exact quote.

Answer: Al Gore

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Republican critics of Vice President Al Gore accused him of claiming to have invented the internet. What Gore actually said during a March 9, 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer was "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Vint Cerf, the computer scientist most closely credited with creating the Internet as we know it, backed up Gore, saying that as a member of Congress, he had been involved in technology issues and had pushed the funding that led to the expansion of the Internet. Gore was explaining technology to colleagues back in the 1970s. Gore sponsored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which provided $600 million in federal funding to expand computing infrastructure, and was a major impetus for the creation of the World Wide Web.