The most famous misquote?

Above - the famous Sun headline from the Winter of Discontent in January 1979, which has passed into folklore as the complacent utterance given by then Prime Minister James Callaghan on returning from a summit in Guadeloupe. In fact, the exchange went like this:

REPORTER: What is your general approach, in view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?

CALLAGHAN: Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.

What the newspaper did was perfectly legitimate - a soundbite was compressed into an eye-catching headline. They never tried to allege that Callaghan had uttered those infamous words, 'Crisis? What Crisis?' But the claim that he did has passed into folklore, with the supposed 'quote' even finding its way into dictionaries of quotations.

Some other well-known political sayings, either misquoted or taken out of context:

On Your Bike
Attributed to Norman Tebbit in 1981, following his speech about his unemployed father looking for work in the 1930s depression, and used in subsequent years as shorthand for Conservative intransigence to the plight of the unemployed. Tebbit's actual words were:

I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it.

There's No Such Thing As Society
Famously attributed to Margaret Thatcher. She did, in fact, say these words in an interview with Woman's Own in October 1987. However, looking at the complete context of the line gives a rather different perspective which might even resonate with many of her detractors:

I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

Let's Bomb Russia
Only half-jokingly attributed to US President Ronald Reagan. On live radio in 1984, supposedly intending it to be a quip and thinking himself off-air, Reagan declared,

My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

So that’s what you get, people said, for putting an actor in the White House.




Monkish Ignorance
And finally, one which is interesting for what it left out. Well-known polymath, intellectual and pacifist George W. Bush, in a speech celebrating the Fourth of July, quoted Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA, as follows:

On the fiftieth anniversary of America’s independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be — to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all — the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Now, what Jefferson actually wrote was:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Do you see what he did there? One wonders why such an important anti-religious sentiment should have been deliberately left out. A clear sin of omission, perhaps, from one determined to push his own agenda of 'monkish ignorance and superstition' through?...