Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Facts are the enemy of truth

Dale Wasserman — Man of La Mancha, 1965 Dale Wasserman 1914–2008 · American playwright and screenwriter
Disputed In copyright

It is not in Don Quixote — not in Cervantes’s Spanish, and not in any English translation, because there is nothing there to translate. The line was written by Dale Wasserman for the musical Man of La Mancha (1965), where his Cervantes-Quixote throws it at Dr Carrasco, who has just said ‘These are facts.’ Wasserman quoted it back in his own preface to the published play. The practical consequence: this sentence is in copyright, while Don Quixote is not.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Facts are the enemy of truth” Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha (1965). Not Cervantes, and not from Don Quixote. In copyright.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Miguel de Cervantes. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright. A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Dale Wasserman — American playwright and screenwriter. Theme: "Facts are the enemy of truth". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Facts are the enemy of truth". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Work
Man of La Mancha — book by Dale Wasserman
First staged
1965 · music Mitch Leigh, lyrics Joe Darion
Grew out of
Wasserman’s 1959 television play I, Don Quixote
In Cervantes
Absent — no Spanish original exists
Rights
In copyright — Wasserman died in 2008

Facts are the enemy of truth. Man of La Mancha, 1965

Wasserman's line, in the language it was written in. It works on stage because it is an answer to something — Carrasco has just finished a list of facts — and it loses its footing the moment it is lifted out and handed to a seventeenth-century Spaniard as a philosophy.

Man of La Mancha — the published play

How we traced it

  • We looked for a Spanish original first, because that is what would settle it. There is none. The phrase has no counterpart in El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), and it appears in none of the standard English translations — not Shelton, not Ormsby, not Grossman. A line that exists only in English is a line that was written in English.
  • It exists in a specific English scene. In Man of La Mancha, Dr Carrasco lays out the case for reality — there are no giants, no kings under enchantment, no chivalry, no knights, and there have been none for three hundred years — and closes with ‘These are facts.’ The reply is the quotation about the musical ↗.
  • Wasserman then quoted himself. In the preface to the published play he writes that ‘Facts are the enemy of truth,’ says Cervantes-Don Quixote — and that this is precisely what he felt and meant. That hyphenated ‘Cervantes-Don Quixote’ is almost certainly how the misattribution started: a reader takes the name for a citation rather than for the name of a character in a play the published play ↗.
In copyright

This one genuinely matters. Don Quixote is public domain and so are the older English translations, so people reasonably assume anything Quixote says is free — but this sentence is not from the novel. It is a 1965 American dramatic work by an author who died in 2008, and it remains under copyright for decades yet. Short attributed quotation for comment or review is ordinary practice; putting it on merchandise, in an advertisement, or reproducing dialogue at length is a licensing question, and Man of La Mancha is actively licensed for performance. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is a clean case with an expensive twist: the wrong author is four hundred years old and free to quote, and the right one is modern and is not.

Not Miguel de Cervantes not in the novel

The sentence does not appear in Don Quixote in Spanish or in any English translation of it. There is no chapter number to give because there is no passage. Quote-aggregator sites list it under Cervantes with no citation at all search the text ↗.

Dale Wasserman, 1965 written for the stage

It is dialogue from Man of La Mancha, spoken to Dr Carrasco after his catalogue of facts, and Wasserman quotes it in his preface to the published play. He never claimed Cervantes wrote it — he attributed it to his own character, ‘Cervantes-Don Quixote.’

A character's name read as a citation the mechanism

When a playwright writes a historical figure as a character, everything that character says acquires the historical figure’s authority on the way out of the theatre. The same thing happens to Shakespeare’s Caesar and Bolt’s Thomas More. It is the single commonest route from stage dialogue to fake quotation.

Public domain is the wrong assumption in copyright

Because the line is credited to a seventeenth-century author, people treat it as free stock text and print it on things. It is a 1965 work whose author died in 2008. The misattribution does not just get the credit wrong — it gets the licensing wrong.

Written by Dale Wasserman for Man of La Mancha in 1965, not by Cervantes. There is no Spanish original because there was never anything to translate — and the line is still in copyright the source ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

It is a defence of the imagination that arrives dressed as a paradox, and it lands hardest in an argument you are losing on the evidence. Wasserman gives it to a man who has been told, correctly, that giants do not exist — and it is meant to be both magnificent and slightly mad, which is the whole tension of the play.

Detached from Carrasco and pinned on Cervantes, it stops being a character’s defiance and becomes an aphorism, which is a much less interesting thing and a much more useful one to anyone wanting to wave away inconvenient information. Wasserman’s Quixote is not licensing that. He is a knight refusing to stop being a knight.

Cervantes never wrote it. A playwright did, in 1965 — and it is still in copyright.

How a musical line became a Cervantes quotation

1959: Wasserman writes I, Don Quixote, a non-musical television play about Cervantes in prison.

1965: it becomes Man of La Mancha, with Mitch Leigh’s music and Joe Darion’s lyrics, and runs for years.

In the script, Dr Carrasco itemises reality and ends ‘These are facts.’ The answer is the quotation.

Wasserman’s preface repeats it and calls the speaker ‘Cervantes-Don Quixote’ — his own name for his own character.

Quotation sites drop the hyphen, keep the Cervantes, and the line joins the public domain by mistake.

It has not. Wasserman died in 2008 and the play is still licensed for performance.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Creativity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Man of La Mancha — the musicalen.wikipedia.org

Authorship, the 1959 teleplay it grew from, and the Carrasco confrontation the line belongs to.
Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play — published textpenguinrandomhouse.com

The printed play, including the preface in which Wasserman quotes his own line back.
Dale Wassermanen.wikipedia.org

The actual author — and the dates that decide the rights question.
Don Quixote — Ormsby translation, full textgutenberg.org

Search it yourself. The phrase is not there, which is the finding this page rests on.

The true author

About Dale Wasserman

Dale Wasserman

1914–2008 · American playwright and screenwriter

Dale Wasserman was a self-educated American dramatist — he left school early and rode freight trains before finding his way into theatre — who wrote two enduringly popular stage adaptations: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Man of La Mancha. He was firm that Man of La Mancha was never an adaptation of Cervantes’s novel; it dramatises Cervantes himself, imprisoned and defending his story. Which makes the misattribution a small joke at his expense: his best-known sentence is one almost nobody knows he wrote.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Wasserman, Dale. Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play. Music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion. First staged 1965. Not in Cervantes, Don Quixote.

MLA (9th ed.)

Wasserman, Dale. Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play. Random House, 1966.

APA (7th ed.)

Wasserman, D. (1966). Man of La Mancha: A musical play. Random House.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Facts are the enemy of truth’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/facts-are-the-enemy-of-truth

Copied