Getting Quotations Right

I find it intriguing to hear stories about misattributions of quotes, particularly when the words become associated with the supposed speaker. The New York Times recently had an article by the Yale Book of Quotations. A number of the examples are surprising:

For example, we all think we know that Harry Truman originated “The buck stops here.” But we are all mistaken. Truman did receive a “gadget” displaying these four words made at the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Okla., mailed to him in 1945 and then displayed by him on his desk. A search of electronic newspaper databases, however, pulls up The Reno Evening Gazette of Oct. 1, 1942, with a photograph of a sign clearly reading “The Buck Stops Here” on the desk of Army Col. A. B. Warfield.

I never would have guessed that "all politics are local" could be attributed to a 1932 article in a Maryland newspaper rather than Tip O'Neill.

Serenity Missing in Considering Serenity Prayer

The Serenity Prayer is short and insightful, whose opening is well known:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Prostestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed to have written it, but there seems to be a significant question of whether he was right:

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Some refer to the prayer as if it were a proverb, while others appear to claim it as their own poetry. None attribute the prayer to a particular source. And they never mention Reinhold Niebuhr.