Thomas Jefferson never said any of these things!

Thomas Jefferson never said any of these things!

It has long been a technique of the unethical and/or the downright stupid to add gravitas to their pronouncements by claiming an origin from an acknowledged genius. Before the internet and cable television, such misinformation was generally confined to discussions between individuals, and it was difficult back then for one person to publish or broadcast misquotations without somebody else fact-checking the claims. The self-publishing capability of the internet, however, has made it a simple matter for a person to promote a personal agenda by merely typing an opinion beneath the solemn visage of an acknowledged sage, then posting the .jpg on a social media site or a blog. Sometimes these misquotations go viral. I hate the word "viral" in this context. It's actually more of a plague than a virus.

Here are some other examples:

Confucius never said: "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." How could he? Very few people got to "choose" a profession in China 500 years before Christ. In fact, Confucius did say almost the opposite. He argued that the enlightened master should be wise in choosing our work for us! "When the person in authority makes more beneficial to the people the things from which they naturally derive benefit;-- is not this being beneficent without great expenditure? When he chooses the labors which are proper, and makes them labor on them, who will repine?"

Benjamin Franklin did not say, "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither," mainly because he was a genius, not an idiot. The very essence of "civilization" involves people banding together and surrendering absolute liberty to create mutual security. Before the dawn of civilization, our cave-dwelling ancestors discovered that absolute freedom is not such a good thing, except for the strongest and most violent among us. Franklin did say, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." With those essential qualifiers, the statement becomes indisputable. Without them, it is gibberish.

John Stuart Mill did not say "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives," again because he was not a fool. In fact, the LEAST-educated people, high school dropouts, vote overwhelmingly for liberals. Among those with no high school diploma, President Obama beat Governor Romney 64-35. On the other hand, the MOST-educated people also vote overwhelmingly for liberals (55-42 Obama). Using educational achievement as a reasonable surrogate for intellectual capability, it can fairly be argued, at least in the context of modern American politics, that most stupid people are liberals and that most smart people are liberals. (That reality renders the liberal coalition highly fragile.) Everyone in the middle tends to be conservative. Here is what Mill actually said: "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative." Get it? Not "conservatives," but "THE Conservatives" with a capital "C." He is not referring to "conservative" with a lower-case "c" as a general political philosophy, but with an upper-case "C" as a specific political bloc in 19th century England whose members were, in Mill's esteemed but pompous judgment, chowderheads, presumably because they often disagreed with him, thus failing to suitably acknowledge his genius to his satisfaction.

Einstein never said, "I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots." If he had said it, an editor would probably have re-worded it to employ a more suitable verb than "surpass" ("suppress," perhaps?). A movie called "Powder" claimed (fictionally) that the great physicist once said, "It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." The movie's version at least includes proper grammatical parallelism, and may even be a wise observation, but I can't give you a link to the real quote because the real Einstein never said that or anything like it.

Pretty much every aphorism attributed to Mark Twain is spurious.