
U.S. Representative Claudine Schneider (RI) telling an admitted joke about Quayle
"Quayle Quotes" http://www.snopes.com/quotes/quayle.htm, Urban Legends Reference Pages
Misattributed
Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February 2008)
U.S. Representative Claudine Schneider (RI) telling an admitted joke about Quayle
"Quayle Quotes" http://www.snopes.com/quotes/quayle.htm, Urban Legends Reference Pages
Misattributed
“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
Last words before being hanged by the British as a spy, (September 22, 1776), according to the account by William Hull based on reports by British Captain John Montresor who was present and who spoke to Hull under a flag of truce the next day:
‘On the morning of his execution,’ continued the officer, ‘my station was near the fatal spot, and I requested the Provost Marshal to permit the prisoner to sit in my marquee, while he was making the necessary preparations. Captain Hale entered: he was calm, and bore himself with gentle dignity, in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him: he wrote two letters, one to his mother and one to a brother officer.’ He was shortly after summoned to the gallows. But a few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, ‘I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.’
Some speculation exists that Hale might have been repeating or paraphrasing lines from Joseph Addison's play Cato, Act IV, Scene IV:
How beautiful is death when earned by virtue.
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
that we can die but once to serve our country.
See George Dudley Seymour, Captain Nathan Hale, Major John Palsgrave Wyllys, A Digressive History, (1933), p. 39.
Another early variant of his last words exists, as reported in the Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser (17 May 1781):
I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged, that my only regret is, that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.
“I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.”
Post-trial statement (modeled after a quote by American revolutionary Nathan Hale), after being declared guilty of flag desecration for wearing a shirt that resembled an American flag (1968), quoted in "The Trial of Abbie Hoffman's Shirt" in The Huffington Post (8 June 2005) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/the-trial-of-abbie-hoffma_b_2334.html.
Lean Logic, (2016), p. 472, entry on Time Fallacies http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/
“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
“I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
Has been attributed to Stephen Leacock's "Literary Lapses" (1910), but the quote does not appear in the Project Gutenberg edition http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt of this work.
Misattributed
Variant: I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Variant: I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it”
“My only regret about having four children is that I didn't have four more.”
1990s, Inside the Actors Studio (1994)
“I am only an average man, but by George, I work harder at it than the average man.”