Wait who said that? A look at quotes and who really said them
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
A look back at one of our most talked about episodes, the quote investigator. James Brown sat down with lecturer and editor Fred Shapiro to talk quotes and misquotes.
Click here for a link to the original episode from July 24, 2022.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Five Things, it's Sunday, June 11th, 2023. |
| 0:12.6 | I'm Five Things producer Alexis Gustin, bringing you one of our most popular episodes, |
| 0:18.3 | The Quote Investigator. |
| 0:21.8 | In 2014, then-President Barack Obama quoted Maya Angelo during his presentation of the |
| 0:28.0 | National Medal of Arts and Humanities at the White House. |
| 0:39.8 | The following year, the U.S. Postal Service dedicated a stamp to Angelo with her face |
| 0:46.5 | on it and that exact quote next to it. |
| 0:49.5 | It was an instant collectible because she never said it. |
| 0:53.9 | Mark Saunders James Brown with more from the quote investigator that aired last July. |
| 0:59.8 | Mark Saunders, the Postal Services spokesperson at the time, told The Washington Post that |
| 1:04.2 | numerous references said the quote was Angelo's and that it was somehow attached to her |
| 1:09.3 | book. |
| 1:10.3 | I know why the Cagebird sings. |
| 1:13.6 | And that's not all. |
| 1:14.6 | There's at least a half dozen other quotes that people say are Angelo's that are in question |
| 1:18.9 | by people like Fred Shapiro. |
| 1:21.6 | He's our guest today. |
| 1:23.6 | Shapiro lectures and works on special projects at Yale Law School. |
| 1:27.6 | He's the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations and the new Yale Book of Quotations. |
| 1:32.7 | We'll link to both in our description. |
| 1:35.2 | In these huge books, he spends more than 2,000 pages verifying and explaining misquotations. |
| 1:42.6 | From Mark Twain to Sarah Palin, Shapiro told me that every generation misquotes in their |
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