Who Said It? Famous Quotes Quiz

Question: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Answer: JFK delivered this line during his inaugural address as the 35th U.S. president. Although he had won the 1960 presidential election by one of the slimmest margins in history, 72 percent of Americans expressed approval of Kennedy after the speech.

Question: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us.”

Answer: In 1964 Malcolm X used Plymouth Rock—the stone slab where settlers of one of the earliest permanent European colonies in North America supposedly first set foot—as a metaphor to describe the plight of Blacks in the U.S.

Question: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Answer: Muhammad Ali’s outspoken cornerman Drew (“Bundini”) Brown came up with this iconic line, which the boxer (then Cassius Clay) used before besting the reigning heavyweight champ, Sonny Liston.

Question: God “does not play dice.”

Answer: Albert Einstein did not agree with every aspect of quantum mechanics, a scientific theory that says the world of atoms and subatomic particles is governed by probabilities instead of certainties.

Question: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Answer: Abraham Lincoln said this as part of his Gettysburg Address, delivered during the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a decisive battle in the American Civil War had been fought.

Question: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Answer: Mark Twain made this quip—often misstated as “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”—in response to an 1897 newspaper report that mistook him for a seriously ill and similarly named cousin.

Question: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Answer: Martin Luther King, Jr., often used this saying, one version of which had originally been delivered by Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker in an 1853 sermon.

Question: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Answer: Seeing the first atomic bomb detonated, J. Robert Oppenheimer (who had overseen its development) recalled this line from the Bhagavadgita. It is more commonly translated as “I am Time, the mighty destroyer of the worlds.”

Question: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Answer: This is a translation of “Veni, vidi, vici”—the pithy Latin slogan Julius Caesar coined to brag about the speed of his victory over the kingdom of Pontus.

Question: “Hate the sin and not the sinner.”

Answer: In his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi admitted that this precept is easier said than practiced. It is his paraphrase of St. Augustine's Latin expression “cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum” (“with love of the person and hatred of the vice”).

Question: “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

Answer: When an interviewer asked Steven Hawking for his IQ, he said he had no idea what it was. Then he shared his opinion of those who make their IQ a point of pride.

Question: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Answer: According to a posthumous biographer, Patrick Henry delivered this line during a speech in March 1775 that inspired many of his fellow Virginians to act against British rule.

Question: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Answer: Friedrich Nietzsche came up with this aphorism for his 1888 book Twilight of the Idols.

Question: “Sic semper tyrannis!”

Answer: John Wilkes Booth, who supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, shouted this Latin phrase, which means “Thus always to tyrants!,” after he fatally shot Abraham Lincoln.

Question: “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

Answer: This is a common paraphrase of something Salvador Dalí once said in his native Spanish during an interview. A more literal translation would be, “I have never taken any drug,…but Dalí is the drug.” The Surrealist artist claimed to have never taken anything stronger than mineral water.

Question: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”

Answer: This is a piece of wisdom Oprah Winfrey distilled from Maya Angelou, who had warned against staying in relationships with people once they have revealed a toxic trait.