Churchill Didn't Say This? (A Lie Gets Halfway Around the World Before the Truth Puts Its Pants On)

In response to the 'news story' that Colin Kaepernick will 'stand for the national anthem' if a team will sign him, a tweet went out about an hour ago. Colin attributed this quote in his tweet to Winston Churchill.

Naturally, triggered someone wanted to point out that Churchill didn't say this quote. He linked to a pretty good article that went over 8 other quotes falsely attributed to Winston Churchill. I just want to focus on the one surround the quote, "A Lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can put it's pants on."

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From 9 quotes from Winston Church Hill That are Totally Fake

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

This is perhaps one of the more popular quotes attributed to Churchill in recent years. But even if he said it, and I’ve found no reliable evidence that he did, many other people said versions of it before him.

Before the turn of the 21st century, the quote was more often attributed to Mark Twain. For some reason, sometime in the late 1990s and early 2000s there’s a shift and many quote books start attributing the saying to Churchill.

The Mark Twain version of the quote often uses “boots” instead of “pants,” but either way, Twain was far from the first to express this sentiment, if he did at all. The most common date ascribed to Twain using this quote is 1919. Twain died in 1910.

There are dozens of instances of this quote popping up in the 19th century, as Quote Investigator helpfully lays out. And the sources are all different, as you can see.

In 1840, one publication attributed it to Thomas Jefferson: “falsehood will travel over the country, while truth is pulling on its boots.” While a magazine from 1846 called it a Chinese Proverb: “Error will travel over half the globe, while truth is pulling on her boots.”

But the oldest version might come from as early as 1787 in a collection of sermons written by the British clergyman Thomas Francklin: “Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn...”

Whoever said it first, it wasn’t Churchill.

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End of Excerpt -- Pretty interesting stuff if you ask me.

It's almost like that 'telephone game' where a message gets translated so many times as it goes around the room. Winston Churchill probably did say this and we'll never really know, like so many things. He probably is not the originator of the saying - again we'll never really know. It would seem that the 'saying' goes back for quite some time, but the 'way' of saying it has changed over time.

Meanwhile, the 'truth' of this saying is not diminished one bit.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston S. Churchill

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) October 8, 2017