Political misquotes: The 10 most famous things never actually said

Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty!" Ilsa Laszlow never said, "Play it again, Sam," and Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson." But these misquotes remain firmly lodged in the public consciousness, even though they appear nowhere in the original works.

The same is true for things "said" – that is, widely attributed to, but not actually said – by political figures. Sometimes a misquote is cooked up by opponents or parodists as a way of discrediting or mocking the figure. Sometimes a line is attributed to a widely admired person as a way of making it sound more authoritative, like when someone co-signs a loan. And sometimes it's just a mistake.

Here are 10 of the most widely believed – but completely bogus – things ever "said" by political figures.

- Eoin O'Carroll, CSMonitor.com

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China Daily/picture alliance/ANN/Newscom/File

2. "To get rich is glorious." – Deng Xiaoping

Western journalists in search of a shorthand for China's dramatic economic turnaround will almost invariably trot this one out. But, oddly enough, it doesn't show up much in Chinese publications, and nobody has managed to find the original source where Deng allegedly said it.

The phrase was popularized by the writer Orville Schell in his 1984 book "To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the '80s." But Schell never actually attributed the words to Deng, telling the L.A. Times's Evelyn Iritani in 2004 that it merely "grew out of the zeitgeist" of China's economic reforms.

That said, it's almost impossible to verify or debunk any quotation attributed to a dead Chinese leader, as China's Communist Party is extraordinarily adept at revising history so that it meets the political needs of the present.