In July 2023, Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Dmitry Medvedev with an epigraph in the form of a quote about an airplane taking off against the wind, which the politician attributed to the writer Ayn Rand. We decided to check if she said anything like that.
On July 2, 2023, it appeared in Rossiyskaya Gazeta article Deputy Chairman of the Security Council and ex-President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, dedicated mainly to relations between Russia and Western countries. As an epigraph to this publication, the quote “When it seems that the whole world is against you, remember that the plane takes off not with the wind, but against it,” signed with the name of the American writer, author of the novel “Atlas Shrugged” Ayn Rand, was used.
Under a pseudonym Ayn Rand wrote Alice Rosenbaum, she was born in 1902 in St. Petersburg and emigrated to the USA in 1926. All her books, letters and other sources are well researched and digitized - you can familiarize yourself with them, for example, in archives The Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit think tank that also studies the writer’s legacy. It was not possible to find anything similar to the quote used in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta article in this and other similar sources.
Moreover, the attribution of this phrase to Rand before the publication of Medvedev’s article is not found on the Internet - usually statement attributed to Henry Ford. However, most likely, he never said this either. Our colleagues from the project The Quote Investigator, dedicated to checking the attribution of quotes, came to the conclusion that this quote is a later version of the inspiring phrase about a kite that flies highest against the wind. The earliest case of the use of a metaphor about an airplane in a formulation close to the one being analyzed was discovered by the authors of the study - the cartoon “The Country Pastor” of 1955. And for the first time it was attributed to Henry Ford, apparently, in 1988 in the small American newspaper The Ridgewood News, more than 40 years after the day death inventor.
If you google this quote and add the name of Ayn Rand to it, in addition to mentions of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta article, you will immediately find only one source - the website anekdotov.net. There the phrase, as on other similar portals, is attributed to Henry Ford, but right above it is another statement signed with the name of Ayn Rand. Journalist Ilya Shepelin suggested, that the author of the article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta did not figure out which name referred to what, deciding that it was the quote about the airplane that was signed with the name of Ayn Rand.
It is not surprising that the very next day the caption to the quote in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta article was changed to “The saying is attributed to Henry Ford and mentioned by Ayn Rand. The exact source is unknown."
It is noteworthy that at the end of Medvedev’s article there is a quote from Anton Pavlovich (obviously, Chekhov is meant): “Life, in essence, is a very simple thing, and a person needs to make a lot of effort to ruin it.” She's really very popular V Internet in a variety of collections quotes from this classic. But even in this case, the attribution is most likely incorrect: in National Corpus of the Russian Language, the largest database of digitized Russian-language literary texts, this quote does not exist at all, as in Fundamental Electronic Library Russian literature and folklore. Search all works Chekhov also did not produce results.
Cover photo: Photo portrait by Phyllis Cerf. Published by Random House., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Incorrect quote attribution
Read on the topic:
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