This year’s winner of the annual “Foot in the Mouth” award is the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for this beauty:
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns � the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
The awards are presented by the UK’s Plain English Campaign which is a pressure group demanding that public documents be written in (surprisingly enough) plain English.
My favorite previous winners are:
“I think that [the film] ‘Clueless’ was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.” – Alicia Silverstone
“I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I’d think ‘No, actually I am a giraffe.” – Richard Gere (the 2002 winner)
Murphy's Law 