IOWA, USA — When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his withdrawal from the GOP presidential primary on his X, formerly Twitter, account on Sunday, he closed his four-minute speech with a quote:
"Winston Churchill once remarked, 'Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.' While this campaign has ended, the mission continues."
DeSantis' announcement was met with a mixture of encouragement and well-wishes from supporters, as well as laughter and derision from his detractors. But within minutes of DeSantis' speech being posted, one aspect of his concession speech eclipsed all the rest: the quote was a fake.
According to the International Churchill Society, a non-profit organization founded after Churchill's death devoted to preserving his legacy, Churchill never said the words DeSantis attributed to him. The quote has been misattributed to Churchill for decades.
"We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers," ICS said in a 2013 letter debunking the quotation.
Researchers began looking for the actual source, but while Churchill never said that quote, it's not entirely clear exactly where it originated. When Quote Investigator researched its origins in 2013, it hypothesized that the first half (i.e. the line about success and failure) may have gone as far back as the early 1900s and the second (the line about courage) may have been added to it by someone else much later.
The very first place Quote Investigator found both halves of the quote, appearing together exactly as DeSantis quoted them: a 1938 ad for Budweiser.
The ad depicts a young boy in a straw hat, overalls, and a fishing rod over his shoulder. The text in the ad pitches Budweiser beer to men with the "spirit of youth," who would never let a rainy day stop them from going fishing.
"Men with the spirit of youth pioneered our America...men with vision and sturdy confidence. They found contentment in the thrill of action, knowing that success was never final and failure never total. It was the courage that counted. Isn't opportunity in America today greater than it was in the days of our grateful forefathers?"
DeSantis and Budweiser
Notably, this is not DeSantis' first run-in with Budweiser. In June 2023, the governor threatened to look into legal action against Budweiser's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, when conservatives railed against Bud Light. The outcry was over the company's decision to send transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a special can of Bud Light with a personalized message on the top of the can that said, “Cheers to 365 Days of Being a Woman.”
Mulvaney shared the personalized can on social media, prompting outrage, a campaign of harassment against her, and a boycott of Bud Light among right-wing groups.
DeSantis claimed Bud Light had "breached its legal duties owed to its shareholders" and characterized sending Mulvaney the can as associating with "radical social ideologies."
"We must prudently manage the funds of Florida’s hardworking law enforcement officers, teachers, firefighters, and first responders in a manner that focuses on growing returns, not subsidizing an ideological agenda through woke virtue signaling,” DeSantis said at the time.
A history of misattribution
DeSantis is far from the first or only person to wrongly credit the line to Churchill. According to Quote Investigator's research, people have been attributing that line to Churchill since at least the 1960s.
The line was particularly known for being quoted by sports coaches, notably disgraced former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who credited Churchill with the line in a quote from the 1971 biography "Football My Way."
"I always remember what Winston Churchill once said, ‘Success is never final, failure is never fatal.’ I think maybe that best explains my philosophy of football as well as life in general," Paterno said at the time.
Coincidentally, the quote was also misattributed to former Bears and Saints coach Mike Ditka in 1990.