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1
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
Eleanor RooseveltmisattributedThe Invincible Strategy, in The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America, by W. L. Watkinson·1907

Wrongly attributed

Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.

2
Then let them eat pastry!
Marie AntoinettemisattributedThe Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Book VI·1782

Wrongly attributed

Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said this. Rousseau wrote the anecdote in his Confessions about an unnamed great princess; he had drafted the passage by 1767, when Marie Antoinette was eleven years old and still in Austria. The line was attached to her name decades later. Note the wording: this 1782 translation of the Confessions renders the French brioche as pastry; the familiar English form, let them eat cake, is a later translator's choice.