“Truth is incontrovertible,” Winston Churchill wrote in his War Memoirs. “Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida might have wanted to take a page out of Churchill’s book on truth and accuracy when he announced the end of his presidential campaign. In a post on X, the governor invoked the famed British Prime Minister, quoting:
“‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’” — Winston Churchill.
The issue? Churchill never said that.
“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers,” the International Churchill Society said in response to a 2013 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which also used the same quote.
“We can find no attribution for either one of these, and you will find that they are broadly attributed to Winston Churchill,” the organization reports. “They are found nowhere in his canon, however.”
Ironically, the wartime PM is among the more oft-quoted and misquoted figures in history, alongside the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Maya Angelou and Mohandas K. Gandhi.
Here are some zingers that Churchill did say:
“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”
“We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”
“You do your worst and we will do our best.”