The British politician is often credited with a quote about how different the views on life of an optimist and a pessimist are. We checked whether this phrase really belongs to Churchill.

An expression supposedly made by the British Prime Minister about pessimists and optimists can be found on several sites with collections of aphorisms, for example on Socratify.net, "Great words" And "Pearls of Thought". The quotation attributed to Churchill is also given by the authors of a variety of books: from the collection "Casket of Aphorisms" and a popular science book on neurobiology “So is it full or empty? Why are we all incorrigible optimists? before books about the main British politician of the 20th century like “Churchill. Time is a bad ally" Katherine Gray and “Churchill is joking. The best comedian in British politics" Ian Mackay. The phrase about optimists and pessimists spread across quite large public pages on VKontakte with hundreds of thousands and even millions of subscribers, for example “Start with yourself!”, "Motivation. Further - more!, "Business Motivation", "Great words | Quotes and aphorisms", "What do men talk about" And "Cynic". Users of other social networks did not stand aside, including Facebook And Twitter.

Reputable sources do not agree with the popular attribution on the Internet. Thus, the International Churchill Society, which deals with the legacy of the British politician, directly declares, that the verified quotation could not be found among the 15 million surviving texts and speeches of the Prime Minister. This confirms and a published collection of documents digitized by the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge.

By data According to The Quote Investigator, the earliest known mention of this phrase dates back to 1919. Bertram Carr, the mayor of Carlisle in north-west England, said during one of his speeches: “The walled old city eventually becomes mothballed and becomes an obsolete monument to itself. The wheels of progress cannot overcome this wall, and this situation can be disconcerting. However, we are able to look at it as optimists, for whom every difficulty is an opportunity, and not as pessimists, for whom every opportunity presents some difficulty.”

At the same time, our colleagues at The Quote Investigator suggest that similar statements were relatively popular in the English-speaking world at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At least in the press of that time (mostly American) there are several references to very similar phrases. It was probably Carr who first proposed the formulation that became widespread a century later.

Churchill does have a quote about pessimists and optimists, but it is seriously different from what is attributed. In his 1938 essay, the politician wrote: “We remember the sardonic wartime joke about the optimist and the pessimist. An optimist was a person who did not think about what happened until it happened to him. A pessimist was a man who lived next to an optimist." In turn, a quote about difficulties and opportunities steel be attributed to Churchill, judging by research by The Quote Investigator, already in the late 1970s.