I can find no attribution to Churchill which is the reason inferior quote sources fail to provide it. (Google the phrase and what comes up are stray references in Facebook or corporate promo, not by any historians.)
Finest Hour 153 (Winter, out in January) contains a "Datelines" entry which might be of interest.... NEW YORK, AUGUST 29TH— Writing in The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/ o2BOJx), Brian Morton explains our frustration with the constant bending, maiming and misrepresenting of quotes by Churchill and others: “I saw a mug with an inscription from Henry David Thoreau: ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined!’ Thoreau was not known for his liberal use of exclamation points. When I got home, I looked up the passage (it’s from Walden). Thoreau wrote: ‘I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ “When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso—all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said. “Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela—it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price. “But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat?hl=en.
