One of the favorite parts of my work as a writer is that I spend a lot of time copying passages from my reading into my giant quotation documents.

When I copy these passages, I’m careful to mark whenever I edit out any part of a quotation, and I also re-read the original passage carefully, to make sure that I’m not distorting the author’s meaning by cutting a quotation in a way that causes it to mean something unintended.

I’ve noticed a few prominent examples of where people—probably without knowing it—quote only part of what someone said, but when you read the full quotation, the meaning changes dramatically.

For instance, I wrote a short, unconventional biography of Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. People often quote Winston Churchill as saying, “Never give in.”

Here’s what he actually said, at a speech he gave on October 29, 1941: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Well, that last addition changes his meaning quite a bit. “Never give in—except to convictions of honour and good sense.” That qualification covers a lot of territory!

I also often hear people quote the line “Information wants to be free.”

This observation comes from Stewart Brand, who is a project developer and writer, who is probably best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. At the 1984 Hackers’ Conference, Brand said: 

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.  

So he does indeed say that “information wants to be free” but he gives equal weight to the idea that “information wants to be expensive,” and that addition gives a very different meaning to what he’s saying.  

I’m reminded of one of my Secrets of Adulthood: “The opposite of a profound truth is also true.”

And I’ll add that there’s another famous proverb that people claim has an important addition, but in fact, that claim seems to be apocryphal. 

The quotation we’ve all heard is “The customer is always right.” Now, in the last several years, people have begun to maintain that the actual quotations is “The customer is always right, in matters of taste,” and they often attribute that full quotation to Harry Gordon Selfridge, the retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges. In fact, there’s no actual evidence of that he did say that. But it’s a great example of how adding just a few words can totally alter the meaning of a well-known saying.

Along the same lines, sometimes, I hear a quotation that I love, but I wish I could tweak it just a bit. Style icon Diana Vreeland was a fount of brilliant observations, and one of her great lines is “The eye has to travel.” But I always think, “Too bad, that line would be better if she’d said, ‘The eye must travel.’” But that’s not what she wrote. 

I love quotations, but if we quote someone, we must make sure that we accurately convey their meaning. 

If you love quotations as much as I do, you might like my Moment of Happiness Page-a-Day calendar. It has a beautiful quotation about happiness and human nature for every day of the year.