5 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Audrey Hepburn wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Audrey Hepburn wrote no memoir, so her real recorded voice lives in interviews, in books that quote her, and above all in the speeches of her UNICEF years, which survive as typescripts in UNICEF's own document archive. Every line in this collection is verified against one of those sources.
Much of what circulates under her name has no source at all. The most famous cases are documented below.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
The line is from the 1995 remake of Sabrina, spoken by Julia Ormond in the role Audrey Hepburn had played in 1954 — Hepburn had died in 1993, two years before the film. She says no such line in the 1954 original, and no interview or speech records her saying it in life.
The earliest known appearance is an anonymous signature line in a 1998 Usenet posting, five years after Hepburn's death; a 2001 business book printed it as “author unknown,” and it was pinned on Hepburn on Twitter by 2009. No interview, speech or book from her lifetime contains it.
The “Time-Tested Beauty Tips” were written by the American humorist Sam Levenson and printed in his 1973 book In One Era and Out the Other. Hepburn genuinely loved the piece and read it aloud, always crediting Levenson — which is how his lines ended up wearing her name.
A phrase search across HathiTrust's full corpus of digitized books and periodicals returns zero printed appearances, and the attributions on quote sites never cite an interview or a page. There is no evidence Hepburn said it.
The “I believe in pink” litany cannot be found anywhere before the late 2000s, more than a decade after Hepburn's death, and its earliest traced appearances are on social-media pages, not in print. Nothing like it appears in her interviews or speeches.
There is so much we cannot do. We cannot give the children back their parents, but we can return to them their most basic human rights, their right to health, cleanliness and life.
Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering…
I would also like to express my immense gratitude to James Grant for having given me the privilege of becoming a volunteer for UNICEF and having allowed me to speak for those children who cannot speak for themselves.
These are not natural disasters but manmade tragedies for which there is only one manmade solution — peace…
Eastern Europe, Russia, Yugoslavia are facing a winter of despair and as always it will be children who will suffer the most and bear the scars the longest.
No. The line is spoken by Julia Ormond in the 1995 remake of Sabrina — Audrey Hepburn had died in 1993, two years before that film. Hepburn's own 1954 Sabrina contains no such line, and no interview records her saying it.
There is no evidence she did. The wordplay first appears as an anonymous internet signature line in 1998, five years after her death, and was attached to her name on social media around 2009.
No — the humorist Sam Levenson wrote those “Time-Tested Beauty Tips,” printed in his 1973 book In One Era and Out the Other. Hepburn loved the piece and read it aloud, always crediting Levenson, which is how his words came to circulate under her name.
No printed source has ever been produced for it, and a search across HathiTrust's full corpus of digitized books finds no appearance at all. Treat it as a quote-site invention.
From her 21 April 1989 statement to the UNICEF Executive Board: “There is so much we cannot do. We cannot give the children back their parents, but we can return to them their most basic human rights, their right to health, cleanliness and life.”
She became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988 and spent the last five years of her life on field missions and fundraising — Ethiopia, Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia — describing the work as speaking for children who cannot speak for themselves. Her speeches from those years are the main source of her verified quotations.
Yes, as far as the record goes: it is printed in David Hofstede's 1994 reference book Audrey Hepburn: A Bio-bibliography. The longer internet version adds a closing clause (“because you can't take it in all at once”) that is not in that text.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Audrey Hepburn.
Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Audrey Hepburn.
Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Audrey Hepburn.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Audrey Hepburn page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Audrey Hepburn page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Audrey Hepburn page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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