Finishing the February 20th issue of Entertainment Weekly, I glanced at the ad on the back cover, and was immediately puzzled. Wasn’t that a quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech delivered at the Sorbonne in 1910?

Cadillac wouldn’t just go ahead and use the quote without attribution, would it?

Cadillac would.

At first, since I couldn’t remember the passage word for word, I thought the ad’s opening text was perhaps an allusion, rather than a wholesale uncredited taking of the entire quote, and the company could then be forgiven. But no, it’s indeed the actual Roosevelt quote, only severely slashed to fit the needs of a print ad in EW.

Here’s the entire quote, with the sections used shown in bold.

It is not the critic
who counts;

not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs
to the man who is
actually in the arena,

whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;

who strives valiantly;

who errs, who comes
short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;

who knows
great enthusiasms,

the great devotions;

who spends himself
in a worthy cause;

who at the best
knows in the end

the triumph of
high achievement,

and who at the worst,

if he fails,
at least fails
while daring greatly,

so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It turns out there’s a television commercial which uses almost the entirety of that section of the speech, save for the final line. Apparently this is all part of a relaunching of the brand to air during the Oscars on February 22.

Still no attribution, though. Why, Cadillac, why?

I don’t like it. And I don’t think Theodore Roosevelt would have liked it either.