French author Albert Camus is often quoted as having said “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” It is a rather insightful look into the way that storytelling is a window into understanding reality. Yet, if one were to try and track down the source of this quote, one would discover that Camus never said this and the quote is, in fact, fiction. While, sure, this might add an extra layer of meaning about how its not wrong when it comes to art but it is also a reminder that the internet is full of misinformation. The future is unpredictable and new technology is taking us boldly into brave new worlds but I always try to remember the inspiring words of former President Abraham Lincoln who said “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” Its a great quote I saw on Facebook once…oh wait, turns out that, like Camus, Lincoln never said that.
The internet is full of these. Here’s a few favorites:
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” — Benjamin Franklin
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” — Mark Twain
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” — Voltaire (was actually said by Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
“The ends justify the means.” — Niccolo Machiavelli (possible source is actually Ovid)
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sometimes there is even a source attributed to it. Such is the case with the Dostoevsky quote–which has even appeared in articles by major news outlets–being purported to come from his book Notes From the House of the Dead. But having read the novel I can assure you it is not there. Sometimes false quotes are a reinterpretation of what was said, and sometimes they are just misattributed. Marilyn Monroe is often quoted as having said “well behaved women seldom make history.” It has appeared in many easily shareable memes (which certainly help spread the misinformation) but also appears in articles or even on t-shirts sold at popular clothing stores. It is a good message and it is a real quote, the problem is that Monroe gets the credit while it was written in 1970 by Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in an essay on major figures of pre-Revolutionary War American women. She even wrote a book about how the quote was so widespread yet misattributed.
In the novel Summer by Ali Smith, there is a moment early on when a character recites a quote she is using for an essay: “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.” She tells her mother the quote comes from a famous philosopher and so I eagerly Googled the quote and wrote “Hannah Arendt!” in the margins. A paragraph or two later I realized I had walked directly into Ali Smith’s trap. When the mother asks the daughter where Hannah Arendt said this, the daughter can’t find it and admits she was citing the website BrainyQuote.com as her source. I dug through the internet and while I found many instances of people citing this quote to Hannah Arendt, nobody could provide a source.
The lesson here isn’t that you can’t trust the internet, per say, but more that you need to be equipped with the tools of informational literacy in order to sift through the endless static of the internet and tell fact from fiction. You can read more in depth on how to identify misinformation in another blog post HERE, but the basics of vetting information are:
- Identify Who Provided The Information
- Acknowledge Any Potential Bias
- Check the Purpose of the Information
- Verify Citations and References
A major aspect of this is checking if the website is even a valid source of information and when you find a quote it is always a good idea to see if you can find the original source of the quote. This can be tricky because, even with AI, search engines will pull any website that matches the key words. Using Perplexity AI as a test to search for the Hannah Arendt quote used in the Ali Smith book I was given multiple different quotes, only one of which were actually used in the novel. Searching the source of the quote, I was given links to various websites that contained the quote, none of which provided any authentic source where she had said it (because she didn’t).
There is another commonly repeated fake quote that is rather relevant to this topic. You have likely heard the rather sinister quote from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels that “tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Unfortunately there is no known source for this quote. But it is a highly useful quote making it easy for even journalists to use it without checking sources and it becomes even more sinister because the context of the quote is directly pointing to how it became so widespread and used. In his book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, author Sander van der Linden examines why misinformation is so commonly spread and often the case is that it is simple and therefore easily repeatable as well as useful for arguments. But, much like the fake Goebbels quote points out, it is the repeated use that inevitably embeds it into our minds and culture:
“Regardless of whether the statement was true or false, belief in the truth of the claim went up as a function of repetition. In other words, the more often you hear a statement, the more ‘true’ it sounds. This became known as the illusory truth effect.” - Sander Van der Linden, Foolproof
So watch out for fake quotes and use the skills of informational literacy before repeating it, like all the bars with the Benjamin Franklin quote with “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Even the Founding Father’s aren’t immune to being wrangled into misinformation, such as the often repeated George Washington quote “I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the cherry tree.” This quote is a fine example of American mythmaking, but George Washington himself never said it. The story was created by Washington’s biographer, Parson Weems, and in 1904 it was revealed that Weems frequently made up stories for his biographies to make them more engaging and there is no source for this commonly heard Washington story. But then again, he also never had wooden teeth but that’s a history lesson for another time and one you could find more information about at your local library. You can also browse this list of books about misinformation to help keep yourself informed and ready to identify false facts online and you can check these books out here at Herrick District Library.
Stay informed with these books on how misinformation works, how to spot it, and what to do about it.
