Most Misquoted Quotes & Sayings

I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly. — Stanley Kubrick

I wish I could take back every interview. Over and over again, I read them later, and either I'm misquoted or I said something stupid. I'm just not very good at it. — Chloe Sevigny

Oh, I got totally misquoted saying I can dance like Rihanna. I can't! What I did say is that I enjoy a dance-off with my stepdaughter and her friends. — Anna Maxwell Martin

Practice is everything. This is often misquoted as Practice makes perfect. — Periander

Journalists have misquoted people for so long - and quoted them out of context that for many people like to have their words on record. — Jason Calacanis

I tend to thrive on being misquoted. It's the only way I sound good. — Jamie Campbell Bower

The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery — Oscar Wilde

I will not be misquoted! — Todd Barry

I've heard it quoted that I was dead. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. — Tom Lehrer

I've been really upset sometimes when I've been misquoted. And it's the one thing they use in big print. Or it's taken out of context. Thoughts are fluid and words are sticky. That's the thing. — Daphne Guinness

But wait. What blood from yonder mortal drips?" Lord Akeldama misquoted. — Gail Carriger

Silence can never be misquoted. — Calvin Coolidge

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew - at least they claimed to be Communists - couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves. — John Steinbeck

A man can smile and smile yet still be a villain,' I quoted. (Or misquoted. It was probably Shakespeare, most quotations seem to be.) — Trisha Ashley

Silence is not only golden, it is seldom misquoted. — Bob Monkhouse

I was often misquoted. I was supportive of my managers, even though they all may not think so. — George Steinbrenner

The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech. — Carl Clinton Van Doren

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted. — Hesketh Pearson

There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line - no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth. — John F. Kennedy

Bobby is the most misunderstood, misquoted celebrity walking the face of this earth — Yasser Seirawan

An author should be delighted, not annoyed when he hears himself persistently misquoted. He could receive no higher compliment. It proves that the world has frequent and urgent need of his thoughts and will rather change the manner in which he expresses them than do without the things expressed. — Hesketh Pearson

Now, I'm not going to be misquoted on this like I have numerous times before, so I'll be quite clear. I've never said hitler was my hero, just that if he had focused on more than one race he would have had the right idea. Try to turn that one against me. — Zach Braff

I'm the most misunderstood, misquoted person I know, honestly. — Dusty Springfield

Every interview is as much an impression of the journalist as it is the artist or subject. You look at interviews and you see a portrait of two people. The worst thing that can happen is if you're misquoted and then that quote is misquoted. That does drive one crazy. The most embarrassing thing is when your words are misrepresented or sometimes you say something stupid and you live to regret it. — Antony Hegarty

Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted
and misquoted
by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile. — T.S. Mathews

No more misquoted forms, lost invoices, redundant entries, missing checks, or delays caused by incomplete paperwork. — Bill Gates

Oftentimes, the First Noble Truth is misquoted as "All life is suffering," but that is an inaccurate and misleading reflection of the Buddha's insight. He did not teach that life is constant misery, nor that you should expect to feel pain and unhappiness at all times. Rather, he proclaimed that suffering is an unavoidable reality of ordinary human existence that is to be known and responded to wisely. — Ajahn Sumedho

We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who said, 'There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's faith.' . . . I hope, Dr Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do you honor. — Richard Dawkins

It is intensely frustrating to be misquoted. — Stuart Pearson Wright

Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkessometimes misquoted as opiate of the people. — Karl Marx

Her voice never stops: even when I sleep, it is a shining silver thread running through most of my dreams and all my nightmares, whispering, beseeching, threatening: One word from you is all I want. Just speak one word, and we'll begin. Name, rank, and serial number, perhaps the misquoted lyrics from a popular song: anything will do. From there we'll move with slow cautious steps to gentle verbal sparring, twice-told tales, descriptions of the scarred and darkest places of our old and worn-out souls. I'll love you back; I'll tell you secrets - — Dexter Palmer

You have the right to remain silent. Otherwise, anything you say might be misquoted and used against you. — Jill Shalvis

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. — Joseph Brodsky

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said. — Robert Fisk

Silence too, can be misquoted — Sweety Shinde

My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American Prisoners. — Jane Fonda

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Let them eat croissants. — Brian Spellman

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it ... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying? — Tamsin Greig

Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house.
[Letter to his wife, 17 July 1757, after narrowly avoiding a shipwreck; often misquoted as "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."] — Benjamin Franklin

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted. — Gore Vidal

I never said most of the things I said. — Yogi Berra

I've been misquoted a lot, and there's this tendency for people to put on to you how they think you should be or what they think you should feel. — Maura Tierney

Now I know that there's no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far. But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn't know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn't have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish. You can't make this stuff up, I used to say. — Nora Ephron