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Churchill not Reagan? “Trust, but Verify”

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Ye old, “trust, but verify” cliché that many, most, attribute to Ronald Reagan, and that one hears way too often nowadays, surely goes back much further than Reagan, and likely even further back than the first place I read a version of it. It is certainly a turn of phrase that could easily be lifted (as have most of all our best lines :-) and used in other contexts, not excluding election campaigns:

Winston Churchill’s, “The Hinge of Fate,” 1950, Houghton Mifflin edition, page 687:

“…. Memories of the war may be vivid and true, but should never be trusted without verification, especially where the sequence of events is concerned.”

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