"Britain is not an island...well, yes it is, but..."

"Tensions in Latvia...are tense..." .. You know all those silly misquotes and verbal foibles that get passed around the internet that you've heard a thousand times? Here's a bunch that seem newer and less previously heard. At least to me.

They are, of course, GNU quotes. Check them out.

A couple of more good ones:

"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." (by guess who)

"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it." (by some Congressional Rep from Texas).

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I've seen before assertions that the actual context of the Quayle quote makes clear he understands that Phoenix isn't in California. A quick google search unfortunately turns up way too many people simply repeating the quote without any details so I can't confirm this claim.

While we're on the subjects of quotes... well, okay, it's a bit of a stretch, but I just stumbled across this and I need to share.

I've seen before assertions that the actual context of the Quayle quote makes clear he understands that Phoenix isn't in California.

I've seen his apologists try to claim the same thing about "potatoe". Really, it seems there's nothing he can say that's so dumb they won't excuse it.

My fave: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind, is being very wasteful. How true that is." (His attempt to quote the United Negro College Fund's slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste.")

P.S. The Mariah Carey quote on the GNU site is definitely fake -- I saw that debunked years ago. I'd want citations for some of the others, too.

My favorite mangled metaphor was uttered by Jay Hammond, the governor of Alaska in the late seventies, who said, "the ship of state is breaking new ground."

Nemo, I don't know how you would make an excuse for the potato thing. Frankly, the best defense would be something like "ability to spell isn't by itself a good indicator of intelligence." Which is true. There's so much evidence that Dan Quayle isn't very smart that we don't need to look at his spelling and geographic knowledge.