Why Churchill?
snopes
Finish Seventh_, by Ralph Keyes:
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Since Winston Churchill said so many quotable things in his long lifetime,
it's understandable that he would be involved in repeated episodes of
misquotation. Anyone that quotable will be routinely misquoted.
Countless anecdotes involving Churchill's gift for repartee were bruited
about during his lifetime. In one of the most famous, an outraged member of
Parliament named Bessie Braddock accused him of being drunk at a dinner party.
Churchill responded, "And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober
tomorrow." No evidence exists that this exchange ever took place. On the
other hand, we do have a record of this dialogue in a W.C. Fields movie:
INJURED PARTY: You're drunk.
FIELDS: You're crazy.
INJURED PARTY: You're drunk.
FIELDS: All right, but tomorrow morning I'll be sober and you'll still be
crazy.
In another legendary exchange, Lady Nancy Astor was said to have told
Churchill, "If I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee." Churchill
responded, "If I were your husband I'd drink it. George Thayer, who helped
Randolph Churchill research a biography of his father, discounted this
rejoinder as totally uncharacteristic of the rather Victorian prime minister.
The anecdote actually has a rather long history and changing cast of
characters. An earlier version involved this exchange between Lloyd George and
a female heckler:
HECKLER: "If you were my husband I would give you poison."
LLOYD GEORGE: "Dear lady, if you were my wife I would take it."
Im America, Bennett Cerf thought this story involved St. Louis Cardinal
pitcher Dizzy Dean and a baiting woman spectator during the 1934 World Series
with Detroit. According to Cerf the woman yelled "If I was your wife I'd give
you poison." Dean yelled back, "If I wuz your husband, I'd take it!"
During World War II, Churchill supposedly said of Sir Stafford Cripps,
"There but for the grace of God, goes God." Some time before that,
screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz said the same thing about Orson Welles as they
filmed _Citizen Kane_.
After the war Churchill was famous for noting of his Labor party rival,
"[Clement] Atlee is a very modest man . . . who has much to be modest about."
Churchill denied ever saying this, not the least reason being that he didn't
consider Atlee to be at all modest. Churchill was also said to have called the
mild-mannered Atlee "A sheep in sheep's clothing." When political scientist
D.W. Brogan asked him about that one, Churchill said it was based on a more
pointed remark he'd once made about someone else. Quote monger Nigel Rees
thought the comment might have originated with newspaper columnist J.B. Morton
in the 1930s.
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| "There have always been a lot of people who pretended to read The New |
| Yorker, and didn't really read it . . . who fake the stance, 'Oh, I have |
| just *so* missed the 35,000-word pieces about zinc.'" |
| - Tina Brown |
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| David P. Mikkelson Calif. State Univ., Northridge Northridge, CA USA |
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