The internet has made it extraordinarily easy to share quotations — and extraordinarily easy to share the wrong ones. A memorable line gets attached to a famous name, circulates on social media, gets printed on mugs and posters, and eventually becomes so widespread that most people assume it is genuine. Here is how misattribution happens and what the real quotes actually say.
The Einstein Problem
Albert Einstein is arguably the most mis-quoted person in history. Search for his name alongside almost any subject — mathematics, insanity, fish, trees, relativity — and you will find quotations attributed to him. Some are genuine; many are not.
The most famous example: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This has been attributed to Einstein so many times that many people treat it as a given. However, there is no evidence Einstein ever said or wrote this. Quote Investigator, a research website that traces the origins of quotations, found the earliest known appearances in Twelve-Step recovery literature in the 1980s — decades after Einstein’s death. It appears to be an AA meeting aphorism that was later retroactively attributed to Einstein to give it more authority.
Several genuine Einstein quotations have been identified by researchers — he was a prolific letter-writer and a clear thinker who expressed himself in accessible language. But the proportion of invented or misattributed quotes floating around under his name is striking.
Abraham Lincoln and the Internet Meme
Abraham Lincoln is another magnet for invented quotations. The most widely circulated example: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it. This is obviously a joke, but variations of it are still shared seriously.
More seriously: You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. This is commonly attributed to Lincoln. Researchers at Yale have pointed out that no contemporary source records Lincoln saying this, and it does not appear in his collected writings. It may have originated as a story told about Lincoln, rather than a direct quotation from him.
Churchill’s Unstoppable Quote Engine
Winston Churchill is famous enough, and quotable enough, that hundreds of aphorisms have attached themselves to his name. Several are genuine — Churchill was a skilled rhetorician and a productive writer. But a number of well-known lines are misattributed.
The line If you’re going through hell, keep going is often attributed to Churchill. No reliable source records him saying or writing this. Similarly, Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others is genuine — it comes from a 1947 speech in the House of Commons — but the attribution is often garbled or the context dropped.
The International Churchill Society maintains a database of genuine Churchill quotations and a list of misattributions, which is a useful reference.
How Misattribution Happens
Several mechanisms produce misattributed quotes:
- Paraphrase becoming quotation: A biographer or commentator summarises what someone believed, and later writers mistake the summary for a direct quote.
- Authority laundering: A pithy saying gets attached to a famous name to give it more weight. This happens across cultures — in the English-speaking world, Einstein, Lincoln, and Churchill serve this function; in East Asia, Confucius plays a similar role.
- Social media amplification: Once a misattributed quote circulates online, it becomes increasingly difficult to correct. Fact-checking requires effort; sharing requires none.
- Retrospective attribution: Someone said something similar to a famous line, and over time, the more famous person gets credited instead.
The Real Thing
Genuine quotations from well-documented historical figures are available through primary sources: collected letters, published speeches, transcripts of recorded interviews, and verified biographies. For English-language quotations, the Yale Book of Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are considered the most rigorously sourced references. Online, Quote Investigator (quoteinvestigator.com) has traced the origins of thousands of commonly shared quotations.
When a quote seems almost too perfect — too precisely suited to the moment, too sharply worded for a public figure’s usual speech — it is worth checking. The more famous the attribution, the more sceptical you should be.
Does It Matter?
You might ask whether attribution really matters if the sentiment is good. There are a few reasons it does. Accuracy is a form of respect for the reader. Misattribution inflates the reputations of certain figures at the expense of the actual originators. And when a quote is wrong, everything else in the same piece becomes slightly less trustworthy. Getting the attribution right is, in a small way, a commitment to telling the truth.