Ted Cruz attempted to invoke Churchill when uttering a similar quote in 2016, but missed the mark on one of the words. Langworth, a historian of Churchill's life, has published books on the famous historical figure, including writing about remarks he did and did not make.Īccording to an article on Langworth's website, the same quote that appeared in the Facebook meme was "possibly muddled" from a real Churchill remark from his "Finest Hour" speech on June 18, 1940: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future." Langworth, a senior fellow with the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. Horton/ Imperial War Museums via Getty Images) Winston Churchill gives his famous 'V for Victory' sign while addressing crowds from the balcony of City Hall in Sheffield, during a tour of the Midlands and North of England, 6-8 November 1941. In an email, Lena Leuci, a collections assistant for the museum, said it "appears that there is no written record that Churchill ever said, 'a nation that forgets its past has no future.'" However, she added: "He did strongly believe in (and practice) the study of history." In order to dig deeper and verify whether Churchill actually said "a nation that forgets its past has no future," we contacted America's National Churchill Museum. However, this was all fairly different from "a nation that forgets its past has no future." Finding the Answer In the article, the author wrote: " Santyana, philosopher-historian, observed that a nation which forgets its past is doomed to relive it in the future." The sentence referred to a quote from the 1905 book, "The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress," in which Santyana wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."Īccording to the International Churchill Society, "in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons, Churchill paraphrased Santayana when he said, 'those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.'" A different quote had Churchill using the words "doomed to repeat it," according to Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. For example, in 1985, the Rutland Daily Herald reported a story about remembrances of World War II and the Holocaust. We found some evidence of Churchill saying phrases that were potentially similar to the quote in the viral meme. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images) Winston Churchill arriving at number 10 Downing Street London for a cabinet meeting in 1940. The former British prime minister was born on Nov. While a small number of opinion pieces and "letter to the editor" articles in newspapers have featured the quote since at least the 1960s, none of the stories provided further information on where the remark originated. 6 Capitol riot that said: "If you're disgusted now, but you weren't this summer when cities were literally burning, you're the worst kind of hypocrite." Looking for the QuoteĪs for the supposed Churchill remark, we were unable to find any newspapers or books that confirmed him as having uttered those exact words. We also found a meme on the day after the Jan. In the four weeks between the time that Floyd was killed and the day the Facebook meme was posted, Smithsonian Magazine reported: "Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the Country." This appeared to be what the Facebook account was referencing when posting the purported Churchill quote, "a nation that forgets its past has no future." This was further confirmed after a study of the Facebook user's public-facing posts, which included content riddled with baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 U.S. The meme originally was posted in the aftermath of the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after then-Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, "knelt on his neck, pinning him to the ground for about 9 1/2 minutes." Chauvin was later convicted on murder and manslaughter charges. By September 2021, the post had been shared 982,000 times.
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