Ron DeSantis ends presidential campaign by misquoting Winston Churchill

By Mike Murphy

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

That was the quote, purportedly from Winston Churchill, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used in a video Sunday announcing he was suspending his Republican presidential bid.

One problem: Churchill apparently never said that.

The International Churchill Society, which celebrates the "timeless values" of the iconic prime minister who led Great Britain during World War II, said it could find "no attribution" for that saying by Churchill.

"We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers," the organization said in a blog post, referring to a separate misquote of the same phrase in 2013.

The group said the quote is wrongly "broadly attributed" to Churchill, and added that a number of online sources also attribute the saying to Abraham Lincoln, although there is no evidence of that phrase in the Lincoln Archives either.

"These fake quotes make for good storytelling, but popular myth has falsely attributed them to Winston Churchill," the group said in a blog post.

One quote Churchill did say was: "Success always demands a greater effort."

The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the quote was used.

-Mike Murphy

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01-21-24 1759ET

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