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Suspicious Quotes (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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:

  1. It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
  2. It’s attributed to someone famous
  3. There’s a picture of that person
  4. 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.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

I usually reply with a variation of this image

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

"I never said that!" - Albert Sun Tzu, the art of relativity

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Don't believe everything you read on the internet

-- Benjamin Franklin

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchillian_Drift

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Oh really? There’s a name for this thing too, LOL.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Plato

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
64 points (100.0% liked)

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