Fake quotations

One of the curiosities of the internet is how it enables the rapid proliferation of fake quotations. One species of these are quotes that attribute something to a revered figure that that person not only didn’t say, but would never have said. The motivations for fabricating such fake quotes are obvious.

A more interesting case, to me at least, are fake quotations that sound very much like something the supposed author would have said, or did actually say in some other way.

For example, Hannah Arendt:

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

This sounds very much like several passages in Arendt’s work, most particularly a couple from The Origins of Totalitarianism. But she never said it. Why make up a fake Arendt quote, saying something very similar to things she did say, especially when she was so quotable?

A similar case is Orwell:

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

This sounds quite Orwellian, and the same pseudo-quote is sometimes attributed to Gramsci, who, like Orwell, said similar things as well. Orwell, like Arendt, is compulsively quotable, so making up quotes that sound like something he would say seems very odd.

Here’s a final famous example, which is more in the way of an editorial re-write rather than a fabrication:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This has been attributed endlessly to John Steinbeck. The source here is clearly a 1960 interview in Esquire:

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.”I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

So this one is easier to explain/understand.

But I find the general phenomenon quite interesting, and I’m sure there are lots of similar examples.