Ghost-Written Famous Quotations

[Baker, John]

        Is Orson Welles's famous speech in The Third Man the sort of
thing you mean?  The screenplay and related short novel were by Graham
Greene, who generously noted in his introduction to the novel that
Welles had written this line into the script.  Welles, playing Harry
Lime, spoke the line in the movie.  Wikipedia's discussion, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man#The_Cuckoo_Clock_Speech,
appears to be accurate:


                <<In a famous scene, looking down upon the people
beneath from his vantage point on top of the Riesenrad, the large Ferris
wheel in the Prater amusement park, Lime compares them to dots. Back on
the ground, he makes the now famous remark:

                "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had
warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had
brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and
what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

                Greene has conceded that this remark was not his own
invention, but rather Welles' contribution to the script. Welles himself
admitted that he was inspired to his speech by a much smaller and older
quote that implied the same. (The impact of Lime's statement is in some
ways enhanced by the fact that the cuckoo clock is in fact a German
invention, and the Swiss do not even have that to their credit. This
fact, however, is not very well known.)>>


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Fred Shapiro
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 1:54 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Ghost-Written Famous Quotations

I am writing an article about famous quotations that were actually
formulated by ghost-writers of one sort or another rather than by the
person usually credited with them.  Examples would be speechwriters
whose words are credited to politicians; actors who ad-libbed lines not
included in the original screenplays; literary ghost-writers such as
Robert Graves writing T. E. Lawrence's poem at the beginning of _Seven
Pillars of Wisdom_; etc.  Can anyone suggest examples of such famous
ghost-written quotations?

Fred Shapiro

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org