Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others.
Add Theodore Roosevelt and Plutarch to the list.
A giant banner bearing the face of Theodore Roosevelt decorates the facade of the Office of Personnel Management in downtown Washington and carries an inspirational quote it attributes to the late leader. There’s one problem: Historians say the 26th president never uttered the phrase.
“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength,” says the quote, which is overlaid in serif font under Roosevelt’s portrait and attributed to him.
But scholars of the quotable Roosevelt say there’s no evidence he ever said those words, even though references linking him to it appear online.
“What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt,” Michael Patrick Cullinane, co-director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, said about the federal government’s poster on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses OPM.
The Theodore Roosevelt Center, housed at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University, keeps a list of quotes by the president — about valor, patriotism, leadership, fear, action — maintained and updated for years by historians and researchers along with original documents of origin. Searching the word “courage” pulls up three pages — but no quotes matching the one on the poster. Ask The Post AIDive deeper
Phrases misattributed to Roosevelt are common enough that the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s website keeps a running list of them.
From Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture:This is not sustainable.
— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) June 12, 2026
Plutarch warned us 2,000 years ago that the imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
We have got to democratize our economy so that it works for all. https://t.co/6APdjhw4NU
Apparently it’s a thing to quote Plutarch as having said “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” This phrasing does not appear anywhere in the Project Gutenberg edition of the canonical Clough version of Lives.
It is possible that “oldest and most fatal” is just an unusual translation from the original Greek and so doesn’t turn up in a ctrl-F search, but I am extremely skeptical. As somebody who has actually read Plutarch (and who quotes him accurately in my own syllabus), it doesn’t pass the smell test. Plutarch has a distinctly aristocratic perspective and is more likely to complain about demagogues pandering to the mob than to complain about the dispossession of the poor. For instance, in his lives of the Gracchi he describes the underlying grievances of the depopulation of small farms and the rise of the latifundia, but he also criticizes the Senate for going squishy by offering conciliatory redistributive measures (specifically, a grain dole and colonial land) to the mob, “by gratifying and obliging them with such unreasonable things as otherwise they would have felt it honorable for them to incur the greatest unpopularity in resisting.” Mind you, I think it is entirely fair to read Plutarch and come away with the opinion that the facts he describes provide evidence that inequality is indeed the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics, I just don’t think that’s Plutarch’s own opinion, let alone his language.
