"Nice Guys Finish Seventh": False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations

Leo Durocher is best remembered for saying, “Nice guys finish last.” Except he never said it. What the Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager did say, before a 1946 game with the New York Giants, was: “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.”

Like Durocher’s, many of our best known quotations are inaccurate, misattributed, or both. This is theme of “Nice Guys Finish Seventh”. Ralph Keyes’s book reveals that:

• “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad,” was said about W.C. Fields,...