My favorite among this group:
“Go away! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
— Karl Marx
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Here are some others, both real and apocryphal, not in the article. None of these are 100% legitimate, but some are close. As it often turns out, everything we believe is wrong.
“Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”
(This is a shortened version of a Wilde quote which was certainly not uttered on his deathbed, and may not have been uttered at all.)
Some say that Wilde actually said “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go” to a visiting friend a few weeks before his death in Paris in 1854. Others say that the quote is completely fabricated.
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
(Legend.)
This one is attributed to Edmund Gwenn, or Edmund Kean or Edwin Booth. People obviously think it must have been some notable actor named Ed, but not Asner. It’s most likely that none of them ever said it.
“Thomas Jefferson survives.”
(This one may be a legitimate deathbed quote from John Adams, but it has been partially debunked and in any case did not represent his last words.)
They are the words supposedly uttered by John Adams as he was dying on America’s 50th birthday (July 4, 1826), the day when the second and third presidents both died. Historian Andrew Burstein, in “America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence,” examined the evidence and found: (1) that the quote had been embellished; (2) that it was actually said on the 3rd of July; (3) that it was actually Adams’s second-last utterance; and (4) that Jefferson was alive when Adams allegedly said it, but dead before Adams actually passed.
It is firmly established only that Adams said “Thomas Jefferson …” on the evening of the 3rd, but what followed was indistinct. His actual last words were uttered after midnight, when he asked a simple, pedestrian question, “Is it the 4th?” He would hang on in silence until the evening of the 4th, while Jefferson passed away about noontime.
“I see that you have made 3 spelling errors.”
(Somewhat legitimate – with caveats.)
Just before his execution in 1790, French aristocrat Marquis de Favras supposedly read his death warrant and said something very similar to the quote above, but these precise words actually come from a play by Victor Hugo (“Marion de Lorme”), written in 1828 and performed in 1831. That doesn’t mean the quotation is totally debunked. Four years before Hugo’s play was performed, Louis Marie Prudhomme wrote a book called “Histoire impartiale des révolutions de France depuis la mort de Louis XV,” in which he noted, “Favras then quietly corrects the spelling and punctuation errors made by the clerk in his statement.” It is therefore likely that Hugo was inspired to write his line by what he had read in Prudhomme’s book. In time, Hugo’s scripted line was assumed to represent the actual words of Favras.
“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”
(Possibly legitimate. These seem to have been among the speaker’s last words.)
These were allegedly the last words of Major General John Sedgwick, a Union Army commander, before he was shot and killed by a Confederate sniper in 1864. Some say Sedgwick’s actual quote was “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” It would be a great, highly cinematic story if he had been shot just as he finished that sentence, but that’s probably not how it happened. Others say that while the words are often portrayed as if they were his absolute last statement, this is unlikely to be true.
