Who Said It? Famous Quotes Trivia
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206 free Who Said It? Famous Quotes trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Who Said It? Famous Quotes trivia questions with answers. Forty 'who said it?' questions, each giving a famous line and asking who really said it. The set spans great speeches, from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Churchill's wartime defiance to Kennedy's inaugural, King's dream and Reagan at the Berlin Wall. It mixes in history's memorable one-liners, like Caesar's 'I came, I saw, I conquered', Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' and Archimedes' 'Eureka'. There is a run of famous movie and pop-culture quotes too, from Gone with the Wind and Casablanca to the Terminator and Star Wars, and a handful of clever traps: lines everyone credits to the wrong person, including 'Let them eat cake', the Voltaire quote he never wrote, and the Sherlock Holmes phrase that appears in none of the stories. It works for a pub quiz, a classroom or a party. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation, including the notes on which quotes are misattributed.
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Q 01Who said 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'?
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong said it as he stepped onto the Moon in July 1969; he insisted he had meant to say 'one small step for a man', but the 'a' cannot be heard on the recording.
Q 02Which US president declared 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt said it in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933; thirty-six hours later he suspended all banking in the country, a 'bank holiday' meant to halt a wave of bank failures.
Q 03Who urged Americans to 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy said it in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961; weeks later, on March 1, he signed the order creating the Peace Corps to send American volunteers abroad.
Q 04Which US president popularised the saying 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far'?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt called it a West African proverb when he quoted it in a letter in January 1900, before he was president, but no earlier trace of any such proverb has been found.
Q 05Who pledged 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill said it to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, three days after becoming prime minister; MPs then backed his new government by 381 votes to none.
Q 06Which prime minister told a 1980 party conference 'The lady's not for turning'?
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher said 'The lady's not for turning' at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton on October 10, 1980, refusing to reverse her economic policy.
Q 07Which speech opens 'Four score and seven years ago'?
The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address opens with those words; Abraham Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the 1863 cemetery dedication, after the orator Edward Everett had held the podium for two hours.
Q 08Who delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. left his prepared text for the 'dream' passage after the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him to tell the crowd about the dream.
Q 09Which Revolutionary-era orator is famous for the cry 'Give me liberty, or give me death!'?
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry is said to have closed a 1775 speech to the Second Virginia Convention with the cry, urging the colony to arm because, as he put it, war with Britain was already inevitable.
Q 10Whose reputed last words were 'I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country'?
Nathan Hale
Nathan Hale, a Continental Army spy, is reputed to have said it before the British hanged him in New York on September 22, 1776.
Q 11Which space mission's crew radioed 'Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here'?
Apollo 13
Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert radioed it after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon in April 1970; the 1995 film about the flight changed it to 'Houston, we have a problem'.
Q 12Which US president demanded 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan said it at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987; the State Department and the National Security Council had tried to strike the line as needlessly provocative, but he kept it in.
Q 13Which US president declared 'Our long national nightmare is over' upon being sworn in?
Gerald Ford
Q 21Which baseball legend is credited with the saying 'It ain't over till it's over'?
Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra is said to have coined it in 1973 as manager of the New York Mets, who were near the bottom of their division that summer and went on to win it, along with the National League pennant.
Q 22Which Soviet cosmonaut cried 'Poyekhali!' - 'Let\'s go!' - as he launched into space in 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin said it as Vostok 1 lifted off on April 12, 1961; after a single orbit he ejected from the capsule and came down under his own parachute.
Q 23Which movie line did the American Film Institute rank number one?
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn
Gerald Ford said 'Our long national nightmare is over' moments after taking the oath on August 9, 1974, within the hour of Richard Nixon's resignation.
Q 14Which US president said 'The chief business of the American people is business'?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge said it to newspaper editors in January 1925, then added that wealth was not the chief end of existence and that 'the chief ideal of the American people is idealism'.
Q 15The Latin boast 'Veni, vidi, vici' - 'I came, I saw, I conquered' - is attributed to whom?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar is credited with the boast after routing Pharnaces II of Pontus at Zela in 47 BC, a battle Suetonius says he won within five days of arriving and four hours of sighting the enemy.
Q 16Which French philosopher wrote 'I think, therefore I am' (cogito, ergo sum)?
Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes first published it in French, as 'je pense, donc je suis', in his Discourse on the Method of 1637; the Latin 'cogito, ergo sum' came later, in his Principles of Philosophy.
Q 17Who confessed 'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton wrote it in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke, but the image was five centuries old by then: John of Salisbury had used it in his Metalogicon of 1159.
Q 18The saying 'I know that I know nothing' is associated with which ancient Greek philosopher?
Socrates
Socrates never quite says it in Plato: the saying condenses the Apology, where he calls himself wiser than a man reputed wise only because 'I neither know nor think that I know'.
Q 19The famous exclamation 'Eureka!' - 'I have found it!' - is credited to which ancient thinker?
Archimedes
Archimedes, by Vitruvius's account, leapt from his bath and ran home naked shouting it, having seen that the water he displaced could show whether King Hiero's crown was pure gold.
Q 20Which abolitionist gave the 1851 speech remembered as 'Ain't I a Woman'?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth gave the speech in Akron, Ohio; the refrain comes from the account Frances Gage published twelve years later, which gave the New York-born Truth a Southern dialect.
'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn' is Rhett Butler's parting shot to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939); in Margaret Mitchell's novel he says only 'My dear, I don't give a damn'.
Q 24Which action star turned 'I'll be back' into his signature catchphrase?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger first said 'I'll be back' as the cyborg in The Terminator (1984), then worked the line or a variant of it into many of his later films.
Q 25The valediction 'May the Force be with you' comes from which film franchise?
Star Wars
Star Wars made 'May the Force be with you' its farewell from the first film in 1977; the pun 'May the Fourth be with you' has since turned May 4 into Star Wars Day.
Q 26Which US president kept a sign reading 'The buck stops here' on his Oval Office desk?
Harry Truman
Harry Truman was sent the sign in 1945 by a friend who had seen one like it at a federal reformatory in Oklahoma, where his copy was made; its reverse reads 'I'm from Missouri'.
Q 27'Let them eat cake' is traditionally but wrongly attributed to whom?
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said it: Rousseau told the story of 'a great princess' in his Confessions, written when she was still a child in Austria.
Q 28'I will defend to the death your right to say it' is a line wrongly credited to which philosopher?
Voltaire
Voltaire never wrote it: Evelyn Beatrice Hall coined the sentence in her 1906 book The Friends of Voltaire to sum up his attitude, and readers took it for a quotation.
Q 29Which Sherlock Holmes catchphrase comes from later writers rather than Arthur Conan Doyle's own stories?
'Elementary, my dear Watson'
'Elementary, my dear Watson' never appears in Doyle's canon; Holmes says 'Elementary' in The Crooked Man and 'my dear Watson' often, but never together.
Q 30Which US admiral is credited with 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!' at Mobile Bay?
David Farragut
David Farragut is credited with the order at the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, as his Union fleet pushed past Confederate mines, then called torpedoes.