MEDIA MONDAY / FAKE QUOTES: THE BOOK

Everywhere you look, you’ll find viral quotable wisdom attributed to icons ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, from Cicero to Woody Allen. But more often than not, these attributions are false.

Robert Siegel and Connor Donevan writing for NPR’s “All Things Considered” recently reviewed a new work by Garson O’Toole, “Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind FamiliarQuotations.”

O'Toole (a pen name) is setting the world straight on famous quotations and who really said them.

His original research has uncovered hundreds of modern misquotes, which have infected our books, minds and the Internet.

Using the massive expansion in online databases as well as old-fashioned gumshoe archival digging, O’Toole provides a fascinating study of our modern abilities to find and correct misinformation. And he points out Carl Sagan did not say, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

Here’s who really said the following:

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

― Rob Siltanen

Available from Little A imprint ofAmazon Publishing.

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