Grit and Glory · Notes
Before a line goes on a Grit and Glory shirt, a poster, or a video, it is checked against one file. That file is public now, and this page is it — fourteen famous quotations that failed the source check, each with the curator who did the debunking and the verdict they reached.
We publish it for a plain reason. Anyone can claim their quotes are verified. The only way to make the claim mean anything is to show the list of quotes you turned down — including the ones that would have sold well. Every entry below is a line we could have printed, and did not.
A quote earns a place here when a named curator says it is spurious or unconfirmed. Not when it merely sounds doubtful. Sounding doubtful is a hunch; a curator's verdict is a finding, and only findings belong on a list that decides what gets printed.
These are the five most likely to appear on a motivational shirt, a gym wall, or a quote graphic. All five are in permanent circulation. None of them survives its source check.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world"
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi Spurious
No record of it in Gandhi's writings. It is a later, tidier paraphrase of a 1913 passage in which he made a related but longer and more specific point about self-reform preceding social reform.
Curators: Quote Investigator; The New York Times, "Falser Words Were Never Spoken"
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"
Attributed to Albert Einstein Spurious
No Einstein source exists. The earliest traceable appearances are in 1980s addiction-recovery literature, decades after his death, where it circulated anonymously before acquiring his name.
Curator: Quote Investigator
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit"
Attributed to Aristotle Misattributed
Not Aristotle's words. It is Will Durant's summary of Aristotle, written in The Story of Philosophy (1926). The idea is genuinely Aristotelian; the sentence is Durant's, and Durant is who should be credited.
Curator: Quote Investigator
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do"
Attributed to Mark Twain Unconfirmed
No Twain source has been located, and Twain is one of the two or three names that unattributed aphorisms drift toward by default. Unconfirmed is not the same as disproved — but it is more than enough to keep a line off a shirt.
Curator: Quote Investigator
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts"
Attributed to Winston Churchill Spurious
No record of it anywhere in the Churchill canon, which is among the most exhaustively catalogued bodies of speech and writing in the language. The society that maintains that catalogue lists this line among the quotes falsely attributed to him.
Curator: International Churchill Society, "Quotes Falsely Attributed"
These nine belong to American founding-era material rather than motivational apparel, and they are on the same list because the standard does not change with the subject. They are included here so the list is complete rather than curated to flatter us.
| Quotation | Attributed to | Verdict & curator |
|---|---|---|
| "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" | George Washington | Spurious — no record in Washington's writings. Mount Vernon, Spurious Quotations |
| "I cannot tell a lie" | George Washington | Legend — invented by Parson Weems for his 1806 biography. Mount Vernon, Spurious Quotations |
| "The Constitution is a mere thing of wax" | Thomas Jefferson | Misquoted — truncated past the point where it still carries his meaning. Monticello, Spurious Quotations |
| "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work" | Thomas Jefferson | Spurious. Monticello, Spurious Quotations |
| "When the people find they can vote themselves money" | Benjamin Franklin | Spurious. Monticello / Franklin scholarship |
| "A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch" | Benjamin Franklin | Spurious — no 18th-century source. Monticello, Spurious Quotations |
| "The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home" | Confucius | Spurious — commonly misattributed, with no source text |
| "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people" | John Adams | Genuine but routinely truncated — quote the full sentence and cite the 1798 address to the Massachusetts militia. Founders Online |
| "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" | Edmund Burke | Unconfirmed — not found in Burke's works; evolved from a line of J. S. Mill's. Quote Investigator |
The list is not a document someone is trusted to remember. It is a file, and every candidate line is matched against it automatically before it can reach a design, using overlapping five-word sequences rather than exact strings. That matters because misquotes mutate: "the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing" is the same fake wearing different clothes, and an exact-match check would wave it through. A shingled match catches the variant.
Three of the fourteen entries carry a verdict of unconfirmed or misattributed rather than spurious, and they are treated identically. There is no partial credit. A line either has a source we can point you to or it does not go on a shirt somebody has to wear in public.
The list is also not finished. Fourteen entries is the honest depth of the research done so far, not a claim about the total number of fake quotations in circulation, which is effectively unbounded. It grows when a curator publishes a finding we can cite — not when a line merely starts to smell wrong.
If you want to run the same check yourself on a quote you're about to post, the method is here: How to Verify a Motivational Quote Before You Post It.
The sourced true-story Shorts and the quote apparel screened against this list are at Grit and Glory.
More notes and guides at penloomstudio.com.