“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose”
I do get stabby in these threads however when it is (a) a fictional character, and (b) the commonly attributed quote in question is a paraphrase of things they did say, and not something made up entirely out of whole cloth. The Bogart, Scotty, and Sherlock ones are good examples of that, with the latter one being from the Basil Rathbone adaptations.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house” – that was Tina Fey impersonating Palin on SNL, yet some people seem to misremember and think Palin actually said it. Palin try to claim that the fact that Alaska is close to Russia gives her foreign policy experience, though.
I believe a lot of quote have been misattributed to Churchill. He also didn’t say, in response to a criticism that he ended a sentence on a preposition:
He also probably did not say in response to a woman who accused him of being drunk “madame, you are ugly. Tomorrow I will be sober’ but you will still be ugly”.
Ordinary Welles paraphrased this when, on the Tonight Show, Robert Blake made a crack about his weight: “It’s true, I’m fat. But I can always diet. You, on the other hand, are ugly”.
There is a quote, much beloved of administrators, about how “Excellence is a habit”, etc. that is a full paragraph. Though usually attributed to Aristotle, it was actually written by Will Durant, a historian.
Jean-Pierre Melville used onscreen quotes to start two of his films: one from the Book of Bushido in Le Samouräi, and one from the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Le Cercle Rouge. Both were actually written by Melville.