British policy is often attributed to a quote about how different the views on the life of the optimist and the pessimist are. We checked whether this phrase really belongs to Churchill.

The expression of the supposedly British Prime Minister about pessimists and optimists can be found on several sites with collections of aphorisms, for example Socratify.net, GreatWords.org And "Pearls of thought". The authors of a variety of books attributed a quote attributed to Churchill: from the collection "Casket of aphorisms" and popular science book on neurobiology “So full or empty? Why are we all - incorrigible optimists " to books about the main British policy of the 20th century “Churchill. Time is a bad ally " Katherine Gray and “Churchill is joking. Best comedian of British politics " Yana Macakea. The phrase about optimists and pessimists diverged into rather large publics 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 men are talking about" And "Cynic". Users of other social networks did not stand aside, among which Facebook And Twitter.

Authoritative sources do not agree with the popular attribution on the Internet. So, the International Society of Churchill, engaged in the heritage of the British politician, directly declaresthat the quotation checked was not able to find among 15 million surviving texts and performances of the Prime Minister. This confirms and a published collection of documents digitized by Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge.

By data The quote investigator portal, the earliest of the known references to this phrase dates back to 1919. Bertram Carr, mayor of the town of Carlisle in the north-west of England, stated during one of his speeches: “The old city surrounded by the wall is preserved over time and becomes an obsolete monument to itself. The wheels of progress cannot overcome this wall, and this situation can cause embarrassment. However, we are able to look at it as optimists for whom each complexity is an opportunity, and not as pessimists, for whom each opportunity represents some difficulty. ”

At the same time, our colleagues from The Quote Investigator suggest that similar statements were relatively popular in the English -language world of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At least in the press of that time (mainly American) there are several references to very similar phrases. Probably, it was Carr that was the first to propose that wording that became common after a century.

Churchill really has a quote about pessimists and optimists, but it is serious from the attributed one. In his essay 1938, a politician He wrote: “We remember the sardonic joke of the war about the optimist and pessimist. The optimist was a man who did not think about what happened until this happened to him. The pessimist was a man who lived next to the optimist. " In turn, a quote about difficulties and opportunities steel To attribute to Churchill, judging by the study of The Quote Investigator, already in the late 1970s.