Have you noticed that many quotes attributed to famous people are actually incorrect? When someone sends me one of these fancy quotes of profound wisdom, it looks really suspicious to me if:
- It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
- It’s attributed to someone famous
- There’s a picture of that person
- There’s no source
When I start looking into it, I usually end up reading a quote investigator article that says the original line was written a few hundred of years ago, got mutated many times along the way, and eventually was coupled with the name of someone like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or whatever.
BTW I put that picture together using Imgflip’s meme generator. Seemed appropriate.
You picked a great picture to illustrate this - it’s from The School of Athens by Raphael and not only does your crop depict Plato, to whom quotes are often misattributed, but Raphael was thought to have modeled him on Leonardo da Vinci, who also crops up a lot in these contexts.
Incidentally, today someone sent me a quote misattributed to Socrates, which then pushed me down a rabbit hole. Somewhere along the way, I bumped into The School of Athens, and here we are.
I usually reply with a variation of this image
made this quickly
“I never said that!” - Albert Sun Tzu, the art of relativity
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
– Benjamin Franklin
Churchillian Drift is the term, coined by British writer Nigel Rees, which describes the widespread misattribution of quotes by obscure figures to more famous figures, usually of their time period.[1] The term connotes the particular egregiousness of misattributions to British prime minister Winston Churchill.
Oh really? There’s a name for this thing too, LOL.
Plato
Another thing to watch for is a quote that seems just a bit too “on the nose” for some modern concern of the poster. Like one I vaguely recall from a few months back that equated banks with tyranny and attributed it to Confucius. Confucius lived in the 5th to 6th century BCE. The first modern bank that could have done what the fake quote said started in the 18th century CE. But people were sending this around breathlessly claiming that even the ancient Chinese knew that banks were evil.
🙄
Oh, wow. That’s a new one. I don’t use Facebook or Xitter, so I guess that’s why I don’t bump into breathtakingly amazing stuff like that.
Weird thing is nor do I. Sadly I have people who keep sending things to me asking if this is real or not. (I guess I’m the only person in my social circle with about a third of the Confucian canon on my bookshelf.)
