Quote About People Dying Misattributed to Marjorie Taylor Greene
The Claim
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest faux pas is that she said, “People are dying who have never died before.”
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Emerging story
Recently, a number of social media users have been posting what they claim to be a quotation from Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. “People are dying who have never died before,” she reportedly said. This quotation has sparked ridicule, as it is nonsensical: everyone dies.
These social media posts have gained thousands of interactions.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation concludes that Marjorie Taylor Greene did not state, “People are dying who have never died before.” Rather, it was Ernest Hemingway who coined the phrase.
None of the posts that attribute the quotation to Greene post any evidence such as a video clip, transcript or an interview to substantiate this quotation. Furthermore, this quotation has also been misattributed to other controversial politicians and public figures in the past. In 2021 alone, people attributed the quotation to former President Donald Trump as well as former president of the Indian National Congress Rahul Gandhi.
The phrase was originally coined by the author Ernest Hemingway as a gallows humor style joke. One Hemingway biographer claims that Hemingway first stated that people were dying who had never died before in 1939, when his fellow author Ford Madox Ford died. A biographer of Glenway Wescott, a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, stated that Hemingway was frequently saying this phrase later in life.
Due to the frequency that this quotation is misattributed to politicians and other public figures, and due to our identification of its origin, we rate the claim that Marjorie Taylor Greene stated, “People are dying who have never died before” as false.
