Did They Really Say That? Part 2: Einstein, Roosevelt, Ford and the Films

The first part of this series checked twenty-two quotations, from ancient writers to modern films. This one is mostly modern: scientists, presidents, businessmen and films, plus two lines of scripture.

Six of these fifteen lines belong to somebody else. Two are genuine. Six are real but have been trimmed, reordered or misquoted, including three well-known lines from film and fiction. And one is an origin story that has no source. Each line has its own verdict and source in the table; the sections below are about the patterns.

01The verdicts

All ✕Doesn't hold up◐Partly✓Holds up

01 "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" — Einstein ✕Doesn't hold up There is no substantive evidence that Einstein said it, and The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press) lists it among lines misattributed to him.

02 "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree…" — Einstein ✕Doesn't hold up No substantive evidence that Einstein said it, and it is not in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein.

03 "Do one thing every day that scares you" — Eleanor Roosevelt ✕Doesn't hold up It comes from Mary Schmich's column in the Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1997, the piece later circulated as Wear Sunscreen.

04 "Well-behaved women seldom make history" — Eleanor Roosevelt, or Marilyn Monroe ✕Doesn't hold up It is the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in her 1976 article "Vertuous Women Found": New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735, in American Quarterly.

05 "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" — Oscar Wilde ✕Doesn't hold up No substantive evidence that Wilde said it, and it is not in Ralph Keyes's collection The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde.

06 "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" — Henry Ford ✕Doesn't hold up The Henry Ford museum says it "has never been satisfactorily traced to Henry Ford" and only begins to appear in the early 21st century.

07 "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" — Edison ✓Holds up Fair to credit to him, though the numbers moved.

08 "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" — Franklin D. Roosevelt ✓Holds up Real, and dated. It is from his first inaugural address, 4 March 1933.

09 "Blood, sweat and tears" — Churchill ◐Partly He said it with a fourth word, in a different order.

10 "Elementary, my dear Watson" — Sherlock Holmes ◐Partly Both halves are Holmes's, but never together in Conan Doyle.

11 "Play it again, Sam" — Casablanca ◐Partly Nobody in the film says it.

12 "Luke, I am your father" — The Empire Strikes Back ◐Partly The line in the film is "No, I am your father." In a script copy online, Luke has just said "He told me enough!

13 "Money is the root of all evil" — the Bible ◐Partly Three missing words, "the love of", change the meaning.

14 "Pride comes before a fall" — the Bible ◐Partly Close, and trimmed. Proverbs 16:18 reads: "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." The saying fuses the two halves of the verse into one.

15 "Blood is thicker than water" originally meant the opposite — the blood of the covenant beats the water of the womb ✕Doesn't hold up The reversal is the part with no source, not the proverb.

6 of 15 shown · a mix of every verdict Show all 15 ▾

02The name gets upgraded

The pattern from part one shows up again. A line starts somewhere less famous (a recovery-group meeting, a newspaper column, an online post, a journal article) and after years of repetition it picks up a famous name.

On this page, lines about how to think drift to Einstein, lines about courage and about women making history drift to Eleanor Roosevelt, a witty line about being yourself drifts to Oscar Wilde, and a line about innovation drifts to Henry Ford. An article on the Henry Ford museum’s website says he “has become a patron saint of the entrepreneur, a Paul Bunyan of the business world.” In two of these cases, the person who really wrote the line can still be named.

The Mary Schmich column is a clear example. Do one thing every day that scares you appeared in her Chicago Tribune column of 1 June 1997. By August 1997 the column was circulating without her name, retitled “Wear Sunscreen” and wrongly described as a graduation speech by Kurt Vonnegut. In 1999 it became the spoken-word song “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, which credited her. The line was later attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, and in 2012 Schmich wrote that she had seen no evidence Roosevelt said it.

03The film lines

The three screen and fiction lines follow a different pattern: the misquote carries its own context.

No, I am your father only makes sense after Luke’s line, and the shared version puts Luke’s name where the “No” was. Play it, Sam needs the song named. Elementary and my dear Watson are both Holmes’s words in Conan Doyle, just never in the same breath. In our reading, each misquote works on its own, which makes it easier to share, and in time it is the version people remember.

04The quiet edits

The scriptural and political lines were not misattributed. They were trimmed, and the trim changed them.

The love of money is the root of all evil becomes money is the root of all evil, which is a different claim. Blood, toil, tears and sweat loses the toil. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall is squeezed into one clause. In each case the missing words are the ones that made the sentence longer, and in the verse from Timothy they are the words that carried the meaning.

05How to check one yourself

• If it sounds exactly like the famous person, it is worth a second look. Several lines on this page ended up with a famous name that seemed to fit.
• Look for the earliest version, and its date. A line first found in print in 2004 is hard to pin on someone who died in 1955.
• For a film or book line, check the script or the text. Many are easy to search, and they usually settle it in a minute.
• For scripture, read the whole verse. The shared version is often missing part of it.
• Check the story about the saying, too. An origin story can need a source as much as the quotation does.

How we checked this · Last checked September 2026

• The misattributed lines were checked against Quote Investigator, The Henry Ford and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's own account; the speeches against the American Presidency Project and the International Churchill Society; the Holmes line against our search of the Conan Doyle texts; the film lines against AFI, ACMI, Wikiquote, The Phrase Finder and a script copy; and the verses against the King James text.

Checked September 2026. The verdicts on the six misattributed lines rest on Quote Investigator, The Henry Ford and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s own account; the dated speeches on the American Presidency Project and the International Churchill Society; the Holmes verdict on our search of the Gutenberg texts and Quote Investigator; the film lines on AFI, ACMI, Wikiquote, The Phrase Finder and a script copy online; the verses on the King James text; and the proverb on Jenkyn’s lectures, Grimm’s edition of Reinhart Fuchs and Scott’s novel.

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06Sources