10 Definitely Fake Quotes Not From Aristotle + 1 Probably Fake Quote

Aristotle didn’t say any of these, but I can tell you (in most cases) who did!

You see them all the time. Fake quotes. Passages attributed to a great thinker that they never wrote or said. Often they’re set on a background, sometimes with an image of the author, and shared in social media like memes. Or someone just types them out as text. And they’ll say, for example “Aristotle”. What they never tell you, of course, is which of Aristotle’s works the fake quote came from.

Why not? There’s three main reasons.

• The first is trivially true. If the passage is a fake quote, it won’t be found anywhere in the texts we possess by that thinker. Because. . . if we could find it there, it wouldn’t be fake!

• The second is that odds are the person who is sharing the fake quote got it from someone else — from a website, from a social media post, from a video, or even just hearing someone else say it — and in the form they got it, there wasn’t any source text cited. So they just followed suit

• Third, the majority of people sharing these fake quotes know very little about the thinker it is attributed to, and aren’t really concerned with accuracy, truth, critical thinking, or the other good things those very quotes often reference

I gathered together some of the most egregiously fake quotes wrongly attributed to Aristotle for a video I produced and published earlier this month. If you’d like to watch it, here’s where you can do so.

There’s a lot to write about this topic, I’m realizing, the more I dig into it. I’ll certainly be researching and shooting additional videos calling out fake quotes — and the sites, platforms, and accounts that keep churning them out — including more videos just on fake Aristotle quotes. There are so many other authors to get to as well, even just restricting myself to the domain of philosophy!

There’s a lot of writing to do about this as well. It’s been illuminating to see the wide variety of responses to me pointing out that a quote a person has posted is actually fake, and those are well worth exploring and thinking over.

I was also rather shocked — and I don’t use that word lightly! — when doing Google Books searches on the various fake quotes in order to determine (when possible) their original provenance (who actually did write them), to see how many authors from the 1990s onward have uncritically incorporated these falsely attributed passages into published books! It’s one thing to play fast-and-loose when writing a blog post, but if you’re going to publish an actual book, and you’re going to claim Aristotle said something, you’d think authors would do their due diligence to check whether the passages they quote really are by the people they say they are.

So, I’ve got plenty of work ahead, but it’s certainly tasks I’m looking forward to. For the present, let me just lay those quotes on you. Before I do, though I want to give a shout-out to one website/blog, Sententiae Antiquae, who saved me a lot of legwork by researching and writing their excellent piece “Meme Police: A Collection of things Aristotle Did Not Say”.

Here is the first set of fake quotes wrongly attributed to Aristotle:

1. Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society

2. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom

3. The more you know the more you know you don’t know

4. Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim of human existence

5. Character is made by many acts: it may be lost by a single one

6. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing

7. You will never do anything in the world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor

8. It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light

9. Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all

10. Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in

Some of these are garblings or glosses on things other thinkers have said, like #2 and #3. #2 basically just amplifies the famous Delphic maxim, and #3 kinda looks like something Socrates says, but isn’t quite it.

Some do get a bit of Aristotle’s ideas in there, and then mess it up, like #4 and #5. You can think of them as at best paraphrases that end up losing the thread of what Aristotle actually did say. For example, you wouldn’t find Aristotle’s claiming that you can alter your character radically through a single action.

#8 is actually by Aristotle, just not the Aristotle who was a philosopher, but the 20th century rich guy Aristotle Onassis!

Some are stuff there is just no way (for multiple reasons) Aristotle would ever have said. #1 — a favorite of hard-right-wingers — is a prime example of that, but so is #10.

With #1, #5, #6, and #7, the passages can in fact be easily traced to the authors who originally did write them. These are James Kennedy, J.A. Haighe, Elbert Hubbard, and James Lane Allen.

There is one final quote in the video that technically is a fake quote, since it is nowhere to be found in Aristotle’s work.

11. No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness

We get this one from Seneca, who you would think to be a pretty reliable reporter of what other authors have said. But frankly, we just don’t know in this case.

So there you have it. Ten clearly fake quotes falsely attributed to Aristotle. If you didn’t before, now you know! So that means now that you shouldn’t repeat or repost them as if they are by Aristotle. And when you see someone else doing so, you don’t necessarily have to correct them — if you chose to, though, you’re doing a good thing — but you should be a little suspicious of what else that person might be passing along!

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.