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“You could fill a book with what Winston Churchill didn’t say,” his wartime colleague Rab Butler MP once commented. “It would be almost as long as one made up of genuine quotes.”
Among other dubious distinctions, Republican Ron DeSantis can now join this tome of mistaken citations. In a post shared on X, the hapless DeSantis said: “‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’ - Winston Churchill.”
It is an admirable sentiment – but not one “the British bulldog” ever actually said.
So widespread is this tendency to misattribute sayings to the wartime statesman, it has even inspired the definition “Churchillian drift”, coined by British writer and radio host Nigel Rees in the 1980s.
Writing in Forbes magazine, Mr Rees describes this phenomenon as “the process whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous”.
Even though some of the famous quips associated with Churchill may be of dodgy provenance, his reputation as a great orator remains intact. His speeches in the House of Commons inspired the country to arms, and his writing earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
How thorough is your knowledge of the British Bulldog’s bon mots? Take the Telegraph’s quiz to find out – and don’t cheat by searching Hansard’s digital archives.
