Politicians love history, because gesturing at the past is a great way to lend your talking points a sheen of legitimacy. If the Founding Fathers supposedly said it, it must be true!

If only the same could be said for contemporary politicians, whose grasp of early American history is decidedly wobbly, at times.

Take a look at some fantastic recent mistakes, and remember these immortal words of Thomas Jefferson: “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom, and interns skilled at verifying quotations using Google are the second.”

__1.__Sarah Palin, a veritable posterchild for clumsy oration, had this wonderfully anarchic reading of the famous Paul Revere story:

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.

Revere, as third-graders from coast to coast could tell you, was “riding his horse through town” to warn colonial Americans about arriving British troops. When challenged on her version of the story, Palin doubled down, claiming she “didn’t mess up about Paul Revere” and blaming the reporter for asking her a “gotcha type question.” (The question? Asking about her visit to Boston: “What have you seen so far today, and what are you going to take away from your visit?”)

__2.__Senator Rand Paul, who may or may not picture himself in the White House, tried to quote Jefferson in his own election victory speech. “Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘That government is best that governs least,’” Paul declared. Only trouble is, Jefferson didn’t write that. Henry David Thoreau popularized the phrase, which may have been coined by a long-forgotten magazine editor from the 1830s.

__3.__Congresswoman Virginia Foxx also tried to lean on the third president in a 2010 speech from the House floor. “As Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” Foxx said. Not really—the quote actually comes from John Philpot Curran, and was a bit more unwieldy in its original form: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”

__4.__Indiana Congressman Marlin A. Stutzman also used the “vigilance” misattribution—“Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, said this, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom’”—in a 2011 speech.

__5.__Another Jeffersonian fumble: 2009 remarks from Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn included this line, which Coburn’s aides printed on a poster: “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work to give to those who would not.” Again, no dice—the quote didn’t even appear in print until 1986.