Did you know that FDR was a plagiarist?

Did you know that FDR was a plagiarist? What is his most famous quote?

Yes, you got it right. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

And where does it come from? The night before he gave this famous line during his first inauguration speech after being elected in 1932, he was reading a book of quotes by Henry David Thoreau. The line that caught his eye was...

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

But, in FDR's defense, Leonard Bernstein said,

"If you are a good composer, you borrow from the past. If you are a great composer, you steal."

As an example, the melody for Bernstein's "Somewhere" in West Side Story, was stolen from the middle movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 5 composed about 200 years earlier!

Here is the link to what Bernstein stole

Here is the link to where he stole it from

Written by Dr. Barry Panter