Videos Identifying Fake Quotes Misattributed To Famous Philosophers

Mar 26, 2024

The internet provides a veritable breeding ground for fake quotes to reproduce and circulate seemingly without limit. It’s not as if passages weren’t falsely or wrongly attributed to thinkers before the age of the internet. We had books and lists of quotations that were a mix of genuine and spurious. But today, when all it costs you to copy and paste a quote by itself, or on a background, is a click or two, our social media environment undoubtably contains a higher proportion of fake quotes than in the past.

I’ve produced seven videos to date identifying, assembling, and discussing sets of fake quotes, generally in lots of ten, attributed to various thinkers. For the most part I’ve been working my way through ancient philosophers, and looking at the most common and egregious quotations. Today I shifted much closer to our contemporary era and produced a video gathering ten fake quotes commonly and uncritically attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche (with one bonus quasi-fake quote). Here it is:

Here are links to the other, earlier six videos:

One might wonder whether it’s even worth it to put in the work to call out fake quotes. I think that it is worth doing, even if it does little to stem the tide of people endlessly sharing and resharing fake quotes in an attempt to draw social clout for themselves, because they think they sound cool, or because the quotes seem to express some truth they find attractive. (Or perhaps even mindlessly doing so). It puts out a kind of beacon that sends a message that putting in the work to get things right is still worth something, that while we rarely know the whole truth of things, at least we can make some effort to dissociate ourselves from lies, fakery, bullshitting, and just plain intellectual laziness.

The responses people exhibit to having it pointed out that a quote they shared is in fact known as a false one are quite telling. Some people show that truth and accuracy are values that matter to them. Others blather and bluster in a variety of ways that reveal a kind of insecurity. You can show them precisely where a fake quote originated from, and some of them will still maintain that it’s totally possible the quote came from the author they wrongly attributed it to. Some of them will openly admit that the quote is fake, that they falsely attributed it to the author, but will maintain that it’s true in some more important sense (which basically boils down to them wishing it were true).

As I produce more of these videos - and I don’t get to them quite as often as I’d like to - I’ll add links to them here, and perhaps rewrite this resource page a bit as well in the process. For the time being, there’s seven of these videos you’ve now got.

I’ll close this by asking you readers a question. Confining the pool to just Western philosophers - other people can better do this work for non-Western figures - who else would you particularly like to see fake quotes videos on in the future?

Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy

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